Where You're Going
by BG Sparrow
Summary: Part I of the Time Circuits Trilogy. Emma Brown and Marty McFly become the victims of Doc's experiment gone wrong and entangled in a past that most certainly ensures slim hope for their futures. Tensions mount as they get caught up in saving themselves and Doc before the lightning strikes, never mind the thin line they were walking before the Delorean came into their lives.
1. Countdown

**_"This readout tells you where you're going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were."_**

**PART I: Where You're Going**

* * *

**PROLOGUE  
**_**Countdown**_

Friday, October 25, 1985  
8:18 AM

"Dad! You need to cut the green wire!"

"No, the white one, Doc!"

Emmett Brown sweated over the small ticking mechanism, a pair of pliers shaking in his hand over the jumble of multi-colored wiring in the little metal casing. His daughter and Marty pressed themselves over either one of his shoulders, further scattering his nerves with their frantic yelling.

He was not able to determine which wire would stop the time bomb from exploding if he cut it, and time was running out. Fast.

"Dad, hurry!" Emma wailed, digging her hands into his lab coat.

"Twelve seconds, Doc!"

The blue one? The white one? The yellow?

"I don't know which one!" he shouted in frustration. "There're too many!"

"Just cut one!" Emma said. "It's our only chance!"

"I can't do that!" Doc shouted incredulously. "You two better run for it!"

"There's no time!" Marty said. "Just cut one of the damn wires!"

"No!"

Emma's heart pounded faster with every _tick _of the bomb, her eyes widening as the counter changed over to two seconds.

"It's gonna blow!"

Doc and Marty looked at the timer change to the number one. Emma squeezed her eyes shut and felt her father pull her and Marty into himself, all three of their heads pushed tightly into Doc's chest.

The bomb beeped three times and then exploded.

* * *

Emma shot up with a gasp, hesitantly taking in her bedroom as she panted heavily. She immediately shut her eyes again and lowered her forehead to her knees, wincing as the pain in her ears travelled down her neck. She let out one great sigh, slowly lying back down. Her head rang painfully.

Emma put a hand to her head, furrowing her brow. While her father's unsuccessful attempt to dismantle a time bomb had led to quite the imaginary explosion, she wasn't entirely certain that it hadn't been some other unsuccessful attempt of his ending in a very real explosion.

It wouldn't be the first or last time it happened.

She slid out of bed, still disoriented from the pounding in her head. She wandered out of her room, through the small sitting room, and out into the hall of the lab. Running her hand along the wall to keep her balance, Emma's face fell when she rounded the corner – a mass of falling papers, billowing smoke, and a god-awful smell filled the garage. She started to choke on the stench of singed wires, pulling her shirt collar up over her nose as she shuffled up to the huge amplifier. Finished only a few weeks prior by her father, the giant square speaker sparked, fizzled, and popped, causing her to jump.

Something rustled behind her. Emma looked over her shoulder, hardly surprised when Marty emerged from under a fallen shelf with his guitar and removed his bent sunglasses. They exchanged equally stunned expressions as the last of the falling papers settled around them, Marty's eyebrows rising up into his hair. He looked from the broken amp back to her.

"Rock and roll," he said, blinking at the onset of his own headache.

Well, didn't this look familiar.

"What are you _doing_?" she growled, letting her collar drop before rubbing her face with a cough.

"Band auditions," Marty said as he staggered through the debris, laying his guitar on top of the nearby armchair. "Tryouts are today after school. I wanted to get some last-minute practice in."

Oh, yes. The band auditions for the dance next month. The whole reason this infernal amplifier had come into existence.

And now that it had served its purpose, it had permanently been decommissioned.

The spot on her head that had received a goose egg weeks ago was finally avenged.

When Marty reached her side, Emma looked at him levelly through the haze of electrical smoke. The heavy drowsiness on her face made her look quite disgruntled. He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

"You're coming, right?"

"I have tutoring until four."

"It's Friday. No one goes to tutoring on Fridays."

Emma shrugged, speaking through a yawn. "Some kids are forced to. But I'll try to get out a few minutes early. Besides, my eardrums want to know what the big deal is for you to be practicing so loudly."

"It was a _little_ loud. For eight in the morning."

The fire alarm suddenly rang on a nearby wooden column. Had Emma not grown used to this sound as an incoming telephone call, she would have assumed the explosion of the amplifier had set off the alarm. She scrambled over the rubbish strewn through the lab, finally regaining her balance against the post as she picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Emma, it's me."

"Morning, Dad," she said, glancing at Marty on the other side of the post. He watched on curiously, having not heard from the scientist himself in over a week.

"Good morning, dear. I just called to tell you I'll be home later tonight. I've had a breakthrough with my work. It's the big one. I'm going to the mall tonight to perform an experiment after I get some equipment from home, and I'd like you to come."

"All right."

"Get ahold of Marty. Tell him to meet us there at 1:15."

Without missing a beat, Emma grabbed Marty by the jacket and looked over at him.

"Meet us at Twin Pines tonight at 1:15. Dad's had a breakthrough."

"He's there now?" Doc asked.

She let go of Marty, and he slipped around to her side of the post.

"Hey, Doc."

"Van Halen decided to wake me up with some 'last-minute practice' before the band auditions today."

"You haven't been using that amplifier too much, have you?" Doc asked Marty. "The chance of overload is becoming increasingly substantial. I swear I had it working perfectly, but something keeps going wrong with that damn volume dial."

Marty felt Emma staring at him expectantly, making him feel two inches tall. He chewed on his bottom lip as she smiled, holding the phone away from her ear and nodding to it. Knowing he now had a date to clean up this garage at some point before Doc returned that evening, he murmured that he would "keep it in mind" before Emma brought the phone back to her ear, biting back a laugh.

"Good," Doc said. "I'll see you both tonight. Don't forget now: Twin Pines Mall, 1:15 AM. Emma, I'll be home after 9:00."

"O-"

Suddenly, the many clocks that lined the eastern wall of the garage struck eight o'clock in perfect unison, their many bells, chimes, and _cuckoos_ clashing horrifically and echoing off the cinderblocks behind them. They clapped their hands over their ears and groaned, Marty staring at the shifting eyes of his mother's old black cat clock he had contributed. He didn't even remember what the whole clock-wall thing was about, but after blowing his eardrums out with the amplifier, all that chiming hurt. Plain and simple.

"Are those my clocks I hear?" Doc asked excitedly.

"Yeah!" Marty yelled into the phone, Emma having handed it to him as she took a few steps back. "It's eight o'clock!"

"They're late! My experiment worked!" Doc said happily. "They're all exactly twenty-five minutes slow!"

The two teenagers slowly looked at one another, hoping they had misheard him, but a sickening realization gripped Marty. He suddenly remembered what the wall-clock thing was about now.

"Wait a minute," Marty said. "Wait a minute, Doc! Are you telling me that it's _8:25_?"

"Precisely!"

Emma's mouth dropped open, and she bounded for her room to change and grab her things.

"Really, Dad?!"

"What? What happened?"

Marty half-laughed. "We're late for school!"

He could hear Doc on the other end telling them to hurry as he hung up the phone, probably none-too-happy to learn that Emma was going to be just as late – if not, later – than he was. He dug his book bag out of the mess of papers and placed his guitar on Doc's workbench. By that time, Emma's bedroom door flew open, and she rushed out, tucking some hair behind her ear.

"I blame you," she said, leading him out the door with a light scorn.

"How is it my fault? I set my own alarm clock."

"And yet you're still gonna be late."

"For which I blame _you_."

Despite all of their efforts to avoid him, Strickland and his pad of tardy slips still found them in the hall before they could make it to their first classes. Emma lowered hers to her side as their principle bestowed Marty's fourth, detention-securing slip unto him and laid on a few harsh insults for good measure. Emma nearly slammed the door to her English class; that man shouldn't be allowed to talk to her – or anyone - that way. Just because her father had dated his sister eons ago…

* * *

It was only the start of an unpleasant day.

Her Calculus test left a bad taste in her mouth. The due date on her Baroque Period essay was moved up a whole week so Mrs. Henderson could grade and return them before she went on maternity leave. They were out of iced tea in the cafeteria, she did the wrong study guide for Spanish, and the substitute in Woodshop made them read at their benches instead of working on their projects so that no accidents happened on his watch.

And, of course, the only kid who did show up for tutoring was one of those grounded-until-the-grades-get-better students who didn't know Ne from Na, so she was stuck explaining how to balance stoichiometry equations to the Chemistry-challenged freshman until 4:12. Her face fell as she packed up and bid the librarian a good weekend; Marty's audition was probably over by now.

She tried to salvage her day with some normalcy, but it seemed that no matter the effort she put forth, it was a day destined to unravel into entropy.

She took up her bench in the town square, pulling her feet up and laying her Music History book open on her folded legs. She took out a notebook, hoping to finish skimming the section on fugues before the sun went down when Marty's laughter caught her attention from across the way. She looked up quickly, lowering her pencil until her wrist rested on her knee.

Expecting to see him celebrating with his fellow band mates, Emma bent her brow at the girl taking his books from him, laying a blue sheet of paper on them, and scribbling something down. The girl gave him a coy smile that sent flames surging up Emma's spine. She felt them fan across her face.

Who the heck was she?

The doe-eyed girl nodded to Marty, exchanging a few words and a bright smile with him. Emma's breath caught, seeing him smile like that. Not because he smiled, but because of the way he smiled. At _her_.

She blinked down at her notes and realized how rigid she had become.

With a resigned sigh, the day had gone to hell.

"I can't believe this…" she muttered.

Emma looked back up as Marty's smile followed the girl to the back of the square where she rejoined her friends. They disappeared behind the clock tower, and Emma tried to quell the rush of emotions that had suddenly sought to drown her. Her smoldering gaze drifted back to where Marty had been, eyes widening to find that he was already on his way over to her with that huge grin. She tried to swallow the golf ball lodged in her throat.

"I will never understand how you are comfortable doing homework on a park bench."

He picked up her book bag and pushed it under the bench before sitting down beside her. Emma casually busied herself with her note-taking again, unable to look at him.

"I see you have groupies now. Did the audition go that well?"

"Well, no," Marty said flatly. His disappointment was chased down with frustration. "First off, everyone was running late. We didn't go on until about ten minutes ago. And when we finally got up there, we didn't play thirty seconds before they cut us off. I'm never going to get anywhere if I can't play in front of a real crowd. _And_ I have detention next week!"

Emma cast his sneakers a sympathetic look. "My day sucked, too."

"But your smile radiated like sunshine when you skipped into History. I'm surprised you weren't showering us with flowers." He received a glare similar to that he had that morning, but they eventually both broke down into a short bout of laughter.

"I guess the day wasn't a total loss," Marty mused after a moment. "Jennifer Parker just gave me her phone number."

Emma looked over, Marty flashing her the soft handwriting in the corner of the "Save the Clock Tower" handout. The petit loops and graceful slant of her phone number and _'Call me!'_ were disgusting. Emma was frequently told to become a doctor as illegible as her writing could be. She went back to copying lines from her textbook, now trying to discretely feminize her script.

"She asked me to think about taking her to the dance since we didn't make the band roster."

Emma paused. "Are you?"

"Yeah. Probably. I'm not going to get to play, so I might as well," he shrugged. "I'm supposed to call her this weekend to let her know."

The flames on her face were becoming an inferno. Still, part of her was adamant on keeping up a convincing indifference in the face of her crumbling composure. She glared over at the blue sheet when Marty wasn't looking. She flipped her notebook over.

"You're getting phone numbers _and_ contributing to the Preservation Society?"

Marty rolled his eyes. "I gave them a quarter. Be glad you're sitting far enough away that they've left you alone."

"I dare someone to shake a coffee can in my face right now."

Marty glanced sideways at the venom in her voice. "Somebody needs their peanut butter."

"Somebody needs to clean up the lab."

"Damn it." He'd forgotten all about that. "Let's go, then."

Marty bent over, pulling her book bag out from under the bench and heaving it up between them. Emma put away her things as he stood, tucking his skateboard under his arm and the offending flyer in his pocket.

"Milkshakes?" he asked when they started up the street.

"You buying?"

"That question only has one answer, right?"

"Uh huh."

"Fine."

* * *

She was happy for him. Honestly, she was. She could only imagine the rut he would have been in if Jennifer Parker hadn't asked him out after his "nightmare" of a failed audition; not that Emma hadn't thought to do the same if he was not otherwise occupied on stage the night of the dance.

She would have mentioned that she would still go if he did, and they'd have a good time between his episodes of jealous sulking as the bands rotated throughout the evening. Something funny or stupid would define the night when they reminisced about it in the future – that dance where someone put bubble soap in the toilets or one of the straps on her dress broke. Maybe he'd ask her to dance, and she'd make some snarky comment to ease the tension before happily being lost in the whirlwind of low lights, balloons, and slow music. And then they'd go to Burger King for milkshakes.

But if he was taking a girl that had made it clear from the get-go that she was interested in him, her hope of something gradually manifesting itself between them on the dance floor would be snuffed out before there was even a chance for it to spark.

Still, she was glad that something had taken his mind off his band's rejection, if only for a short time. She knew that she probably wasn't helping much on that front by having him help her clean up from the amplifier's explosion. Furthermore, Marty probably had enough pent-up frustration that he would have taken a ball bat to the thing if he hadn't blown it out that morning.

Maybe she should have bought _him_ a milkshake.

They had broken down a mass of boxes and pushed the fallen shelf back up, Marty collecting all of the papers, books, and binders for Emma to return to their rightful places. As it grew darker outside, they neared the end of their endeavor. Marty handed her one last book he had scraped up from the cement floor. She sighed at the undying presence that was _Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics_.

"Oh, John von Neumann," she said, turning the dented and tattered hardcover over in her hands. "You are so old."

Marty straightened a stack of blank graphing paper on the edge of the workbench and fastened it with a thick binder clip, tossing the papers onto a low shelf with a heavy thud. He looked over her shoulder as she leafed through the careworn pages.

"Whoa."

Colorful variants of handwriting were crammed into virtually every white space. Portions of text were highlighted, circled, or blacked out, and the upper corners of the last fifty pages or so were wrinkled from water damage. The cardboard was showing on the rounded nubs of the book's once-sharp corners, too. All in all, it was miracle the binding was still holding up.

"What does he use this thing for again?" Marty asked. He'd never seen a book so used.

Emma snapped it shut, sliding it between two other books on the shelf similar in height.

"Everything. That book has looked like that since I can remember," she said, sitting on the arm of the armchair in front of the shelf. "We used it for the final physics project on radiation theory our sophomore year, remember?"

Marty made a face, took his milkshake from the workbench, and loudly slurped the last of it from the bottom of the cup.

"No."

Emma smiled.

He pitched the empty cup into the trash and looked back over at the shelf, satisfied with their hour and half's worth of work. If anything, the lab looked better than it did before Doc disappeared the week before, but with his mentor's mental state in a constant flurry, Marty wouldn't expect him to notice.

Now, the amp – he might notice the amp.

Marty tossed his head towards his handiwork. "Do you know where the curtain for that thing is?"

"I'm sure it's nearby," Emma chuckled. "Hopefully this breakthrough of his will buy you some time before he sees what you did to it. Besides," – she stood up from the arm of the chair, heading for the refrigerator – "I don't think he was actually going to use it for anything apart from letting you practice with it."

Marty picked up his skateboard from next to the door. "Speaking of this 'breakthrough,' you wouldn't happen to know anything about it, would you?"

Emma shrugged, sticking a spoon upright into a jar of peanut butter and putting a glass of iced tea in the crook of her elbow. "I've barely seen him at all this week. He's been gone a lot since he took the padlock off the storage room. I don't know what he's working on right now."

"Now where I have heard that before?"

"What?"

Marty smiled. "Just like you didn't know about the amplifier?"

Okay, so she would admit to telling her dad how excited Marty had been about the band tryouts and how that might have influenced him to build the stupid thing, but she wasn't going to admit it out loud, and certainly not to Marty.

Not that she needed to. He knew it. She knew he knew it. And he kept on about the fact, more interested to get out of her why she had even brought it up to her dad in the first place. Never mind he had been their closest friend for years now. His name was regularly going to come up in their conversations around the dinner table.

But it was still fun to give her a hard time about it.

"I didn't know about the amplifier," she repeated for the umpteenth time that month. "I may have mentioned the auditions, but he took it from there." She ate a small swipe of peanut butter from the end of her finger. "He doesn't let me behind the big curtains as much as you think he does."

"I'll see you later, Em," he laughed, watching her head for the next room. "And stop eating so much damn peanut butter."

Emma stopped, turned around, and pulled the spoon out of the jar, pointing it at his grin threatening.

"Leave me and my peanut butter alone," she warned. "We're going to go bond over _Andy Griffith_, and you're not invited."

"Sor-ry," he said, holding his hands up as he dropped his skateboard to the pavement. "I'll leave you to your peanut butter and reruns."

"Thank you."

His smirk was contagious.

"See ya, Em."

"Bye."

The door closed. Emma's face immediately erupted into a full-blown ear-to-ear smile as she headed for the couch, popping a creamy spoonful of Peter Pan into her mouth.

_Eat your heart out, Jennifer Parker._

**. Please Review .**


	2. Zero Hour

**CHAPTER ONE  
**_**Zero Hour**_

Friday, October 25, 1985  
11:52 PM

Emmett Brown pulled the large, white storage van into the alley behind his garage. He glanced down at the clock on the radio, having hoped to be back a lot sooner than this. He was cutting it close; by the time he'd gathered everything up, he would barely have enough time to prepare it and review the experiment before Marty was to meet him. Granted, it was the middle of the night, and a few minutes' time might not make much of a difference in the long run, but tonight was all about time.

Tonight, time and its parameters, its properties and possibilities were all going to be redefined if this experiment worked. Those few who already commended his work in the scientific community would herald him amongst the greatest minds in history. And those who respected him as much as the shit on their shoes would suddenly have big smiles plastered on their faces, professing that they had "believed in him all along" or apologizing profusely just to be in the good graces of the man who made time travel possible.

If all went accordingly, that is.

"Damn."

Einstein barked from the passenger side of the cab's bench, pawing at Emmett's wrist as he shut off the ignition.

"All right, all right," Doc said, sliding out of the cab so that his dog could get out. "I hope she remembered to put some food out for you. Stay close and keep quiet, now."

Einstein scampered off around the corner of the garage and out of sight. Doc looked up then, scanning the streaked windows to find the dramatic light show of the television flickering within the sitting room. He pressed his lips together and hurried inside, so sure of what he'd find – Emma balled up on the couch asleep with the TV on, an empty jar of peanut butter lying next to her.

He doubled back to the small kitchen area curiously, and again his suspicions were affirmed. He sighed, smiling to himself when he saw two cases of her favorite food stacked next to the refrigerator on the floor, most of the first case gone. He looked back towards the sitting room at the sound of her voice.

"Einie! Hey, boy! Oh, I missed you, too!"

The dog barked enthusiastically. Doc left the kitchen, walking across the sitting room again to the couch as Emma scratched Einstein behind the ears vigorously. She gave him a sleepy smile.

"Hey, Dad. Next time you barely live here, leave Einstein," she yawned, the dog lying on his back across her feet. She bent over and rubbed his belly, cooing at him. "I missed my puppy dog. Yes, I missed you!"

"Next time I leave you grocery money, I hope you use it for something other than twenty-four jars of peanut butter," he said, still amused behind his stern look.

Einstein rolled off Emma's feet and allowed her to stand. She reached up on her tiptoes to kiss her father's cheek.

"I did," she said, being pulled in for a hug. "I got bread to make sandwiches."

He didn't look too amused at _that_, but she smiled up at him nonetheless.

"So," she said, her voice sing-song, "what's this big breakthrough all about?"

"All in good time," Doc replied, quickly getting back on track. He pulled a piece of paper out of the front pocket on his white jumpsuit and handed it to her. She unfolded it, dutifully reading it over as he gave her further instructions on their way out of the living room.

"I need everything on this list put in the truck immediately. Put everything in the cab. I don't want the back compartment opened until we get to the mall. You get what's on there, and I'll handle the radiation suits and plutonium."

He darted away. Emma stopped mid-step on her way through the lab. "Did you just sa–"

Narrowing her eyes, she stared after her father, confused as he bent down in front of his bed and dragged a big metal case out from underneath it. Her first few questions were answered; she swallowed hard at the biohazard sticker, eyes widening instantly as she read 'PLUTONIUM' below it.

She huffed incredulously.

"How long has that been there?!"

"Shh! I brought it in Tuesday night after you had gone to sleep," he said, hastening out the door with it. "Don't worry; it's been in this special lead-lined case, so there was never any risk for exposure."

"Oh, well, that makes it fine, then!"

Emma followed him outside to the van. "Where did you get _plutonium_? What are you working on that you _need_ plutonium?"

Doc pushed the case under the driver's seat of the cab, rounding her with an austere, anxious frown.

"Go get the things from the lab," he hissed.

Emma deepened her brow, stepping in front of him. "Dad, what's going on? Are you okay?"

When he turned to her with a knowing grin, she straightened uneasily. As bizarre as she was accustomed to him being, this was one of those moments where he looked borderline manic. It wasn't just because of the intensity of the excitement in his wild eyes, but it was that knowing aura behind the excitement and in the curve of his wide grin. Any lesser person would have backed away.

"This is it, Emma," he said. "This is the one."

* * *

Preoccupied by her father's insistence on being infuriatingly ambiguous and vague, Emma had absentmindedly collected the items on the list he'd given her, save for the video camera. This discovery led to her digging change out of the ashtray of the van and crossing the parking lot to the payphones, yawning through several rings until Marty answered.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's Em. Are you still coming down here?"

"Yeah," he drawled. "I'll be out of here in two minutes."

"We need you to stop by our place for the video camera. I forgot to grab it."

"Sure. Did you find out what he's been working on?"

Emma looked back across the parking lot as Doc climbed into the back of the van through the cab. A glow of bluish light came from the windows. She hugged herself with her free arm.

"No. And I'm half-afraid to find out."

Marty chuckled in the background. She shook her head.

"You don't understand," she said quickly. "He's freaking _me_ out. He has a case full of plutonium."

"What? Where would he even get plutonium?"

"I watched him shove it under the seat in the cab, Marty. He's brought the radiation suits and everything."

"I'm sure it's fine, Em. I'll stop for the video camera and be there soon, okay?"

"All right," she conceded. "Bye."

* * *

Emma had taken to sitting on the ground next to Einstein after her father had instructed her to place a stopwatch around his neck. She watched the truck shake slightly as he ran around inside it, insisting that if she came in, she not enter the storage compartment. Finally, when Einstein ran off to a nearby tree, she got up, pretending that dusting off her white pants would magically rid them of her decision to sit on damp asphalt. She walked to the driver's side door, yelling in at him.

"Aren't you at least going to _tell_ me what it is?"

Doc poked his head through the small door between the seats of the cab and looked at her. His daughter was his partner in nearly every experiment, even if it was only to tighten a bolt. She wasn't used to being so excluded from his projects, and revisiting the last several weeks, Emmett realized he hadn't said two words to her about anything he was working on – time machine, amplifier, or otherwise. It wasn't fair to hold her in such suspense, and the contempt on her face said as much.

Doc stepped into the back of the van, letting the door swing open as he disappeared with a beckoning smile.

Emma quickly grabbed the steering wheel and seat, clambering into the cab after him. She touched the tiny, hollow door as she inched into the dark compartment, immediately walking right into a thinning vapor and hard, metal protrusion. She yelped, pain shooting up the front of her shin.

"Ow!"

"Careful, careful!" Doc said off to her right somewhere. "Here."

Overhead, two rows of dim fluorescent lights crackled to life on either side of the ceiling. Emma looked down at what she had walked into – a car bumper. Still shaking the grimace from her face, her eyes wandered up, instantly captivated by the heavily modified automobile before her.

"Whoa." Emma slid along the tight space between the passenger side of the vehicle and the wall of the van, tentatively letting her fingertips graze the cool steel of its body. "What did you do to it?"

"Do you remember taking it upon yourself to alphabetize all of my blueprints when you were six? You came across something called the 'flux capacitor?'"

Emma smiled; she did. It was a strange, equilateral "Y" that vaguely reminded her of a biohazard symbol like the one on the back of her father's radiation suit, harkening back to the fact that plutonium was involved in this experiment. Closely examining the large rectangular thrusters on the back of the car, she nodded.

"Yeah, but this is a DeLorean," she half-laughed. "It doesn't look anything like what was on that blueprint. Unless you added a thing or two."

Doc beamed from the other side of the car. "It's inside."

Emma looked up, coming around to his side of the car as hydraulics raised the door over their heads. Emmett urged her inside, and she ducked in, trying to take in all of the gadgetry.

"Is this thing still a car?"

"Look behind you. Between the seats."

There it was – the flux capacitor in all its glory. Its three slender, fiber-optic cables had currents of light energy coursing through them towards its apex, the mild fizzle and zap of electricity humming spiritedly from within the case. Eleven years after seeing it for the first time on paper, it was now a tangible entity thriving with possibility. She looked back at her dad, who had leaned in beside her to admire his creation.

"Well, it's great," she said, "but what does it do?"

"Oh ho," Emmett laughed. "You just climb over there while I back it out, and I'll _show_ you."

Emma carefully crawled over into the passenger seat, crouching in it as she absorbed the overhaul he had done to the interior of the car. When Emmett got in, the door hissed to a close, and he turned the key in the ignition, starting the engine. Everything glowed – buttons, knobs, gauges, things she wasn't even certain _should_ glow. Letting her feet slip to the floor, Emma leaned forward to inspect the readouts on a silver console mounted just below the tape deck.

"What's this? Is it part of the flux capacitor?"

"It's powered by the flux capacitor," Doc said, hitting a button on the visor above his head. The back of the van began to open.

Emma squinted at the black label under the red display.

"'Destination time?'"

The car jerked into gear, and Emma's face nearly hit the console as her father began to back the DeLorean out into the parking lot.

"I'll explain in a moment!"

Emma slowly sat back in her seat, marveling at everything around her with as much apprehension as intrigue. What did the flux capacitor even _do_?

Moments later, she was pulled from her reveries when Doc greeted Marty. Emma let the hatch door soar over her head and popped up over the roof of the car to see him. Marty turned the camera on her, zooming in.

"Fun new toy?"

She shrugged. "I'm still not sure what it does."

"If you'd roll tape over _here_," Doc said from next to the driver's door, "we could get to that a lot sooner than later. Emma, next to Marty. Thank you."

Emma raised her eyebrows, Marty smirking as she joined him. She folded her arms over her chest and looked back up at her father, giving him her undivided attention. Marty turned forward as well and pulled the lens back, settling Emmett in the middle of the frame as the scientist straightened himself professionally.

"Okay, Doc. It's all you."

"Good evening. I'm Dr. Emmett Brown. I'm standing on the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. It's Saturday morning, October 26, 1985, 1:18 AM, and this is Temporal Experiment #1."

Doc then turned to his ever-faithful Einstein, corralling him into the driver's seat of the car. Emma followed Marty closer to the DeLorean, and she was briefly entertained by the thought of Einstein driving the car telepathically.

Doc moved off to the side after buckling in Einstein, holding up the dog's stopwatch next to an identical one around his own neck.

"Please note that Einstein's clock is in precise synchronization with my control watch. Got it?"

"Check, Doc."

"Good."

Emma fixated on the small, boxlike item Doc pulled out from behind the dog as he shut the hatch, stepped back, and extended a four-foot antenna from it. Her eyes lit up. She latched on to Emmett's right arm, itching to get her hands on it.

"What a remote!"

"You got that thing hooked up to the…car?"

Emma smiled up at the DeLorean in astonishment when its motor awoke at the push of a button. It was all she could do to keep herself from jumping up and down.

"Can I do it?"

"Not now, not now," Doc said, taking his arm back from his daughter. "Just watch."

The back tires spun wildly, and the three of them watched as the DeLorean swerved away in reverse before driving off into the distant lot. Emma couldn't take her eyes off it; she had tinkered in engineering, but in no way had she come close to remote-controlling an actual car. Her father ordered Marty to redirect the camera to the DeLorean as it skidded to a halt, backed up another twenty or thirty feet, and stopped. Its engine gave a low, beastly growl.

Doc slipped behind them, grabbing Marty's elbow and pulling him along after him. Emma followed without coercion, waiting on bated breath with eyes as wide as her father's as they stood directly in front of the far-off vehicle, Marty between them with the camcorder.

"If my calculations are correct," – his smile turned smug – "when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit."

Emmett flicked a tiny red switch, slowly moving his other thumb under the right-center lever. He pushed it upwards gently, and a football field away, the DeLorean's wheels screeched, thick, white smoke billowing from the friction generated by the back tires remaining in place. Marty bumped into Emma as he nervously scooted away from her father, so she quickly traded places with him, running over to his other side. She craned her neck between the beeping remote control and the climbing pitch of the DeLorean's stationary acceleration.

Finally, when the counter on top of the remote reached sixty-five, Emmett snapped the red switch down, and the car came screaming towards them ferociously. Entranced, Emma's mouth opened as she involuntary took a small step forward, allowing her father to reach behind her and catch Marty when he went to bolt away from the oncoming car.

Emma let out a shaky breath and narrowed her eyes as the DeLorean barreled toward them. Suddenly, brilliant blue sparks of incredible light exploded along the synapses of the vehicle, leaping into and cracking through the cold air surrounding it. Courage waning, she dropped her face into Emmett's arm when the blinding, blue-white radiance became too much. A deafening _whoosh_ crashed over them like a tidal wave, but a car never collided with her. She looked up as Doc spun around with Marty, a pair of fire trails in the wake of the missing car.

She cursed herself for looking away when she did, chest heaving as she followed the flames between her father and Marty's feet. Emmett began to laugh in disbelief, shouting and jumping next to her with the remote control over his head triumphantly.

"What did I tell you?! Eighty-eight miles per hour!"

Emma was speechless. She should be dead right now.

"The temporal displacement occurred exactly 1:20 AM and zero seconds!"

Marty looked to be a stunned as she was, perhaps even more so. She staggered up next to him as he dropped the scalding license plate back to the pavement, both of them still searching for a car that wasn't there. She swallowed.

What _did_ the flux capacitor even do?

"Jesus Christ, Doc. You disintegrated Einstein!"

Emma wheeled around at her father. "What? _What_ did you do?!"

"Calm down! I didn't disintegrate anything!" Emmett said, digging a notepad from his front pocket as he hurried over to them. "The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact!"

"Then where the hell are they?!"

"The appropriate question is, '_when_ the hell are they?' You see, Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler. I sent him into the future!"

Emma stared at her dad levelly, no longer attempting to logically grasp the situation as he ran to the opposite end of the diminishing fire trails. "I'm sorry, what?"

"I sent him one minute into the future!" Doc said, running back to her as Marty wandered away. "And at precisely 1:21 AM and zero seconds, we should catch up with him and the time machine!"

Her face fell. _Andy Griffith _and peanut butter had left her with some doozies before, but this?

"Okay." Emma put her hand over his furious scribbling, making his insane expression meet her hard one. "What _the hell_ are you talking about? The _future_? Are you sure you didn't just make them invisible?"

For some reason, she was ready to accept that as a more plausible circumstance than time travel.

"Yes! And it worked! My time machine worked!"

"Wait a minute, Doc," Marty said, rejoining them. "Are you telling me that you built a _time machine_…out of a DeLorean?"

"The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

"Style?" Emma asked incredulously. "_That's _why you used a DeLorean?"

"Not _just_ why. It has a practical aspect," Doc defended. "The stainless steel construction made the flux dispersal –"

Emma squinted at his beeping wristwatch when he did, and he took her by the waist, hurrying her off to the side by her tiptoes as he pushed Marty backward. Before she was out of his grasp, a series of cracks broke over them, and she turned, watching the DeLorean materialize right where they had been standing not seconds before, continuing on its trajectory from exactly one minute ago. She was still working through a particularly gripping stupor when Einstein appeared in the driver's seat unharmed, happily wagging his tail.

"Einstein's clock is exactly one minute behind mine and still ticking!"

The dog jumped from the DeLorean, barking all the way back to the van.

Emma turned back to her dad, her eyes wider than she had ever known them to be.

Forget _Andy Griffith _and peanut butter. His "serious shit" theory was right on target.

"He's fine, and he's completely unaware that anything happened! As far as he's concerned, the trip was instantaneous! That's why Einstein's watch is exactly one minute behind mine," Emmett explained, brimming with elation. "He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time!"

Although Marty was still taking everything in, Emma finally began to smile, violently knocked sideways by the realization of the importance of what had just happened and what it meant for her father. For science.

"Oh my god!" she laughed suddenly, causing Marty to start. She leapt at her father, bouncing with uncontrollable excitement. "You just made a dog travel through time!"

"Yes!" Doc said, matching her manic, open-mouthed grin as he gripped her shoulders. "Now you understand! I did it! Time travel _is_ possible!"

Emma was certain she was going to spontaneously combust from the overwhelming exhilaration. "This is huge!" she gushed, firing off questions in rapid succession. "How did you do it? How does it work? Is it the flux capacitor? Is that -?"

"Here! Come over here," Emmett said, pulling Marty and the video camera in tow. "I'll explain everything!"

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	3. The Clock That Went Backward

**CHAPTER TWO  
**_**The Clock That Went Backward**_

Saturday, October 26, 1985  
1:22 AM

Emma jogged around to the passenger side of the DeLorean, bursting at the seams with eagerness to hear how she had just witnessed her dog travel through time. She lifted the door and dived into the seat next to her dad as Marty kneeled outside the driver's door, pointing the video camera at the dashboard.

"First," Emmett said, "you turn the time circuits on."

He pushed a lever down between the seats, and a green light came on under his wrist. Then, the red, green, and yellow displays on the big silver console lit up. The softly illuminated gauges gave a rich, warm sigh.

"This readout tells you where you're going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were," Emmett continued, pointing to each in turn. "You input your destination time on this keypad. Say you wanna the signing of the Declaration of Independence."

He punched in a series of numbers to the tune of a telephone keypad, hitting a button off to the side of it. A tiny white light above his finger came on, and the red line of the console displayed _JUL 04 1776._

"Or witness the birth of Christ!" _DEC 25 0000._

"Here's a red letter date in the history of science: November 5, 1955."

Emma and Marty looked up at him as he trailed off, repeating the date and laughing to himself. Marty leaned out from behind the camera, tilting his head at her in question, but she just shrugged, making a face in Doc's direction.

"What?" Marty asked him, lowering the camera. "I don't get it. What happened?"

"That was the day I invented time travel."

Emma shifted in her seat. Obviously those blueprints from eleven years ago were considerably older than she thought.

"I remember it vividly," Emmett said. "I was standing on the edge of my toilet, hanging a clock. The porcelain was wet. I slipped, hit my head off the edge of the sink, and when I came to, I had a revelation, a vision; a picture in my head! A picture of this," he said, turning and pointing at the flux capacitor. "_This_," – he smiled back at Emma, finally answering her question – "is what makes time travel possible – the flux capacitor."

"Why have I never heard any of this?" she asked. "Not even the story about you hitting your head? That's a good one."

"Em, doesn't he hit his head often enough that you don't need stories to get you through to the next incident?" Marty smiled. She bit her lip when her father looked over at her.

"He's got a point," Doc said, widening their grins. "Besides, there was a lot at stake with this one, and it needed kept close to the chest. But you've both helped with it through the years; you just never knew it. Marty, you made this case the flux capacitor is in," he said, tapping on the glass front of the metal fuse box, "and Emma drew up the early wiring schematics I'd later use for connecting the circuit grid."

Pride visibly swelled in Emma's chest. All her life, she had watched her father work painstakingly after success, vowing at the tender age of three to be "just like her daddy" and "be good at science" so that she could help him one day make his mark. Had she known that years of seemingly disjointed projects and research at her father's request were the basis for the success of this experiment, she might have paid a little more respect to quantum physics. But that was neither here nor there.

"It took almost thirty years and the entire family fortune to realize the vision of that day."

"You were working on this thing thirteen years before I was born?"

Emmett huffed, staring through the steering wheel at a distant memory. "My god," he whispered, looking over at Emma fondly. "Has it really been that long?"

Pink blossomed in her cheeks. "'Fraid so, old timer."

"Well, things have certainly changed around here," Doc said. He left the car, going off on a tangent about Peabody and his "crazy idea" of breeding pine trees.

Emma shook her head after him. "Said the pot to the kettle…"

Marty sniggered, hoisting the camera back up on his shoulder as he panned the interior of the car. Emma rolled out of the shot and the seat. She took a few steps away from the DeLorean, staring at it with a hand over her mouth. This was inexplicably unfathomable. Words truly did no justice. Every emotion known to man was exploding within her simultaneously, and she began to laugh again, shaking her head at the DeLorean. She walked backwards towards Marty, unable to take her eyes off the car for fear it would evaporate from existence.

"Does it run, like, on ordinary unleaded gasoline?"

"Unfortunately, no," she heard her father reply in the distance. "It requires something with a little more kick – plutonium!"

Emma found herself nodding at this simple, everyday explanation as she intently watched the water from the melting ice roll off the hood. Marty didn't seem to be so understanding; his voice rose.

"Are you telling me that this sucker is _nuclear_?!"

Emma turned around as Doc hurried over to them, Marty quickly sticking the camera back up in his face.

"No, no, no, no! This sucker's electrical," he explained adamantly, "but I needed a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that I need."

Emma smiled over her shoulder at the time machine. "Oooh…" So _that's_ why he needed plutonium. "Cool."

Marty rounded her. "Cool?! Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium! Did – did you rip that off?"

To his horror, Doc turned on heel, waving his arms frantically for him to lower his voice. Marty felt his knees quiver as the scientist professed quickly to the camera that yes, of _course_ he had, and he did so by giving bomb-happy Libyans a casing that housed a collection of nothing but junk pinball machine parts.

_Pinball machine parts._

"Let's get you radiation suits! We must prepare to reload!"

Marty huffed in disbelief as Emma meandered up next to him, her eyes not nearly as wide as his.

"Well, I guess we know what the plutonium's for," she said, doing a terrible job of hiding her smile. Marty stared at her.

"Whoa, hang on!" He grabbed her wrist when she went to dart for the truck and pulled her into his side, whispering fretfully at her as they watched Doc rummage for his radiation helmet. "Your dad just told us that he ripped off plutonium that was going to be used in a bomb! Doesn't that seem a bit serious to you?"

"Well, there's no bomb…"

"Emma!"

"I know, I know!" she groaned, shutting her eyes momentarily. "I promise I'll yell at him later. Right now I want to know how he factored in the distance displacement of the Earth's rotation! Come on!"

Now Emma had him by the wrist, dragging him off as if to her favorite roller coaster. She was stuck in Super Excited Scientist mode like her dad, and there would be no hope in reeling her in now. He knew that Everyday Emma wasn't okay with this plutonium business, but as she had chosen to point out in her current state, at least there wasn't a bomb blowing something up somewhere. Instead, its destructive power was being used towards furthering man's understanding of its universe via time machine.

Was that even a real sentence?

A radiation suit was thrown in his face. Emma was already stepping into hers next to the truck and pulling it on skillfully.

"Maybe there are some kind of distance-computation circuits hardwired into the flux capacitor," he heard her murmuring. "Or under the time circuit console. But—no, it'd have to be connected to the flux capacitor somehow, if that's what makes it all possible…"

Marty sat down the camcorder, wriggling into his suit. "What are you going on about?"

"Think about it," she said, zipping her suit up and tying her hair back. "In that one minute of time Einstein skipped over, the Earth had moved over a thousand miles through space. He should be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Or getting sucked into a vacuum in outer space."

"What?"

"Dad! How did you account for the speed of the Earth's rotation and the angle of the axis tilt through orbit?" she shouted, situating her helmet between her shoulder blades.

"It has a lot to do with the Law of Cosines, gravitational pull, and the energy required to keep it in the atmosphere, but most of that has to do with the flux capacitor."

Emma nudged Marty with a knowing grin. "Told you."

"Helmets on!" Doc said, opening the case of plutonium. "We don't want to risk exposure!"

Emma smacked Marty's hood up over his head as she passed. "Helmets on, Marty."

He winced in surprise and steadied himself, looking through the plastic mask to see Doc and Emma staring at him expectantly in their strange headgear from over the plutonium. Marty picked up the video camera and dashed over to them, fixing it over his eye the best he could. He gave a thumbs up, and Doc slowly reached down, lifting a cylinder out of the case. Doc held up the clear cylinder, examining a menacing, bright red tube within it as he carried it to the back of the DeLorean.

Emma tried not to crowd her father; with as much energy as their adrenaline was radiating, having both of them in such close proximity of the plutonium at the same time _would_ be enough to cause a nuclear reaction. Instead, she hunkered down next to Marty and the video camera as Emmett slowly turned the cylinder. As the cherry-red pod scraped and plummeted into the mouth of the plutonium chamber, Marty nearly sent the camcorder flying over his shoulder. Emma straightened from her hunch and looked over at him, narrowing her eyes.

Emmett capped the shaft, removing his helmet. "It's safe now. Everything's lead-lined."

He carried the empty shell back to the case and opened it with his foot. Emma threw her helmet back eagerly, oblivious to hitting Marty with it. Again, he juggled the camera, sending the back of Emma's head a glare.

"Don't lose those tapes now," Doc said, putting his helmet on top of the plutonium case. "We'll need a record. Oh! I almost forgot my luggage."

Emma stared at him. "Luggage?"

"Who knows if they've got cotton underwear in the future!"

"Can I come?" she begged, her hands balling into fists in front of her. She shook them vigorously, trying to quell the urge to bounce up and down again. "Pleeeease, can I come? Please? It's the weekend. I _don't_ have school tomorrow."

"Emma, I can set these time circuits to bring me back the moment after I leave," Emmett said, watching his daughter's shoulders fall as she fixed him under a scornful pout. He sighed. "Perhaps I'll take you in the morning. This isn't the only time I'm going to be using the thing, you know. I'll go ahead now, check things out, see what's happening twenty-five years down the line –"

"Twenty-five years?"

"_Then_, under my supervision, I may allow you and Marty each a turn to come with me."

Emma smiled impishly. "Can I drive when it's my turn?"

Emmett's eyebrows deepened. What a loaded question.

Without breaking eye contact with Emma, he motioned for Marty to roll tape. His daughter shifted her weight to her other hip, settling next to Marty with a proud, gentle smile on him. The door's hydraulics hissed the hatch aloft. Emmett cleared his throat; it was suddenly thick with the indescribable happiness of achieving the impossible against all odds.

He did it. He invented time travel.

Well, maybe not "invented" time travel. He invented what made time travel _possible_.

With a nod, he rested his forearm on the driver's side hatch, trying to expel the nerves from his voice through a breathy exhale when he looked into the camera.

"I, Dr. Emmett Brown, am about to embark on a historic journey."

Wait.

Wait…

He started to laugh. "What am I thinking of? I almost forgot to bring some extra plutonium! How did I ever expect to get back?" he rambled. "One pellet, one trip? I must be out of my mind!"

Emma was about to tell him to hurry up and get one - the sooner he was gone, the sooner he would get back so she could go – when Einstein, sitting up in the window of the truck's cab, barked loudly.

"What is it, Einie?"

The dog looked forward without another sound. Emma looked from Einstein to her father in bewilderment. He looked past her and Marty, and an uneasiness prickled up her spine and over her scalp as his face became grave. He walked up to them unblinkingly, sliding the smooth rubber of his gloved hand along the edge of the stainless steel hatch. It dropped to his side slowly before he stopped.

"Oh my god, they found me. I don't know how, but they found me."

Emma shook her head in confusion. "I- What?"

"Run for it!"

"Who? _Who_?"

"Who do you think?! The Libyans!"

Super Excited Scientist Emma stripped a gear, swallowing hard. Doc's outburst sent her into a dreadful, vicious nose-dive as Everyday Emma recollected in an instant all that he'd said before about the plutonium, the Libyans, the bomb, _the pinball machine parts._

"Oooooh noooo."

She spun around next to Marty, winded at the sight of a man appearing out of the top of a Volkswagon with a machine rifle.

"Holy shit!"

The blue bus gunned towards them, bullets raining around them. She and Marty each grabbed the other immediately, and they stumbled back against the DeLorean together, Emma's radiation helmet knocked over her head sideways. Hearing her father's muffled shouts, she ripped it off, seeing him beat a large pistol with his hand in frustration.

"Dad, over here!"

Another round of fire sent him in the opposite direction for cover – right to the Libyans.

The bus screeched to a stop, and Emmett, trembling, stood straight in the accusing headlights with his hands raised. Meeting the eyes of the man he had personally wronged in their dealings, his heart sank as the gun cocked. Behind him, Emma fought Marty to let go of the back of her radiation suit. Emmett threw his gun in a last-ditch effort to save his life, if only to be granted the mercy of being allowed to turn around and look at his daughter one last time.

Libyan Nationalists, however, tend not to be so merciful.

The man atop the Volkswagon gave a barbaric sneer, baring his gnashed teeth as his finger crashed down on the trigger unforgivingly. Emma's squirming stopped as she and Marty froze in wide-eyed horror. Emmett's body was thrown backwards, his wounded cries silenced when he landed in an unceremonious heap on the asphalt.

Emma suddenly scrambled forward on all fours, Marty having released his hold on her when he jumped up, screaming.

"Nooooo! Bastard!"

Before Emma could even get to her feet properly, the rifle had her and Marty in its sights.

Marty lunged for her wrist, dragging her to the front of the truck for cover as they unleashed another series of seemingly unending shots. He threw himself against the grill as the bullets bounced off the side of the truck with small, bright explosions.

"This way!"

He darted to the other side of the truck, ready to make a break across the parking lot when the Libyans flew around the corner, the headlights washing over him with finality. In the moment that he shut his eyes and choked back a whimper, he realized that Emma wasn't there for him to shield and bury his face into when the bullets ripped through him.

_Click_. _Snap._ Angry shaking.

Marty inched his eyes open in disbelief.

"Go, Marty! Run!"

Blood pulsing in his ears, Marty made a break back towards the DeLorean, pulling Emma to her feet as he blew passed the front of the van. Emma cried out as he shoved her into the DeLorean.

"What? Wh—oh, shit."

A bloody sheen glossed the fender she had been leaning against. Emma righted herself in the passenger seat, choking out painful sobs as the left shoulder of her white radiation suit grew a dark, shining circle. Another level of fear now added to his nightmare, Marty dropped into the driver's seat, hatch in hand. He looked back to call to Doc, to tell him they were coming and to hold on, but the work boots and radiation suit did not move in a weak plea for help; they remained lifeless on the cold ground, not yet marred by the red pool Marty knew must come in the aftermath of such mutilation.

"Marty."

The Libyans' bus finally lurched forward, and Marty slammed the door shut, turned the key, and hit the gas. Emma gasped as she back flew into the seat. The back of her upper arm seared, and she succumbed to tearful moans. The DeLorean ran over the edge of a divider, and she screamed as the painful jolt shot agony up her neck, through her back, and down her arm. She tried to brace herself against the seat with a stiff right arm as the car weaved furiously, bullets snapping off its body relentlessly.

"Marty!"

"Holy shit!"

"What?"

"They have a goddamned RPG!"

Emma gritted her teeth as she was thrown into the negative G-forces of a violent turn, the DeLorean banking sharply around the curve. Successfully managing not to roll the car, Marty's body slammed into the door, and he straightened the wheel.

"Let's see if these bastards can do ninety."

In a world where she wasn't preoccupied with debilitating pain, Emma would hysterically reprimand him for insulting terrorists that had a bazooka pointed at them, but Marty punched the pedal again, sending them speeding down a straightaway, back towards the van. Emma lolled her head upright with the little strength her neck had to support it, and she stayed her short pants at the distinct zaps and pops electrifying the outside of the car.

Her eyes caught the digital speedometer as it flicked over to _87_.

"Marty, no!"

'Light' was too small, too ordinary a word. An astonishing, ethereal brightness blanked out everything around them. Marty winced, and in an instant, the world reappeared, and he was tearing through a field with a scarecrow bombarding the windshield, sliding off in time to reveal an old wooden barn. He hit the brakes desperately, but the wheels slipped against the grass, his radiation helmet fell over his face, and the DeLorean went barreling into the barn.

* * *

The crash may have been cushioned by a wall of hay bales, but it still threw Marty's chest into the steering wheel with considerable force, knocking the wind out of him. Overhead, part of the barn's roof collapsed, and he sat up slowly, nursing a sore neck. The world had finally stopped moving after all the running, swerving, and speeding, and a painful bout of dizziness finally caught up to him. He lowered his head back down to the steering wheel.

"Holy shit," he groaned inside his helmet. He turned his head towards the passenger seat, his breath fogging up the tiny plastic window.

"Em?" He reached out and weakly prodded her once. "Emma? Are you okay?"

She was motionless, her head planted firmly into the dashboard. The inky spot on her shoulder had grown, likely larger beneath the radiation suit. A generous swath of it was smeared on the back of her seat. He sat up and pushed his helmet back, terror-stricken.

"Not you, too, Em," he said, face twisting fearfully. "Come on."

He pulled her back against the seat, pushing two fingers into the side of her throat. Thankfully, a delicate, steady throb was there; she was only passed out from hitting her head. Relief rushed from his lungs, only to instill him with the realization that he was going to lose her if she continued bleeding much longer.

"I'll be right back."

Opening the door, Marty carefully stepped out into the middle of the carnage he had created, his helmet falling over his face. Before he had even taken a step, several screams ricocheted around him, and he fell over, knocking the radiation helmet back from his face. He slowly looked back at a couple of indifferent cows.

"What the hell?"

Marty hurried to his feet, going outside in an attempt to appease the people that had run off.

"Hello?"

Maybe they could tell him where he was, patch Emma up, and get them on their way again.

"Uh, excuse me."

They owned a barn. Homey, friendly farm types were humble and hospitable, if anything. They appreciated the importance of life's simplicities, a good day's hard work, and warm, homemade bread. "_Green Acres_ style," he could Emma say with her lifelong love of old sitcoms.

All he had to do was smooth things over with an apology, promise to come help fix it after school for a few days – no hard feelings.

"Sorry about your barn —"

A deafening gunshot blew a hole in the door next to Marty.

_Green Acres, my ass._

He tripped backwards through the door into the hay, scrambling to shut the door and get in the DeLorean as more bullets blasted through the thin, faded wood of the barn.

"Hang on," he said to his silent passenger.

He floored it, jutting his arm out across Emma so that she didn't hit the dashboard again. The DeLorean raced for the road, Marty swerving, spinning dirt, and mowing over a small pine tree as more thunderous booms echoes after him, gratefully no further passed their mailbox.

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	4. Sapphire and Steel

**CHAPTER THREE  
**_**Sapphire and Steel**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
6:27 AM

"Em? Em, you gotta wake up. Come on."

She incurred a few light taps to her cheek and came to, nauseous from pain. Swallowing a particularly vile lurch, her fingers grazed the tender lump above her right eye. The bright, morning sky was as harsh as the metallic scent of blood wafting from her shoulder. She turned her head in the direction of Marty, trying to see him through a squint as she held her breath. It was an effort to speak.

"Didn't you just give me a concussion three weeks ago?"

"Em, we're in trouble."

She rolled her head over to the window, blinking at the skewed landscape of an endless field halved by a dirt road, pristine Lyon Estates markers, and a billboard flanked by colorful pennants whipping in the wind.

"I wish that meant we were getting a speeding ticket instead of what you're about to tell me."

The hood of the car slammed, and Marty ducked back inside, throwing Doc's suitcase on the seat.

"What?"

"Guess how fast you were going."

It took a moment, but his face fell. Seized with panic, Marty looked over at the time circuits sharply, reading the date on the red display before they beeped out. The plutonium alarm went off.

"And," she added, "guess what we didn't bring."

Marty stared at Emma, quickly leaning in to start the car. The engine gave a few dying whirs despite his multiple attempts to resurrect it.

"You have _got_ to be kidding me."

"Lead foot."

"Speaking of lead," – he nodded to her shoulder – "we need to get you to a hospital. After I move this thing out of the road."

Marty put the gear in neutral and turned the wheel before getting out to push the DeLorean in the direction of the billboard. Emma tried to look over her shoulder at the wound, but craning her neck back at such an angle required tensing a torn muscle, so she swung her head forward with a gasp, panting from the intensity of the raw burn.

Next, she clamped down on her lip, feeling her body start to shake as she reached around with her right arm to assess the damage. Taking a deep breath, she hung her head in the crook of her elbow, barely ghosting the surface of the warm, wet spot. She outlined the jagged shape of the bullet's entrance in the radiation suit and let out a few frightened sobs.

She lifted her head from her arm and brought it around to the front of her shoulder, gently flattening her palm against it. No warm, wet spot. No jagged exit hole.

There was a bullet in her. She had actually been shot.

When the car stopped moving, Marty eventually reappeared outside the driver's door, already half out of his radiation suit.

"There's a sign right up the road that says town is two miles from here," he said, balling up the suit and throwing it on the floor. He grabbed the suitcase from the seat, walking around the front of the car and opening her hatch. "Do you think you can walk that far?" he asked, kneeling on the ground and rummaging through Doc's suitcase.

"Yeah," she managed, pushing herself away from the back of the seat. "I was shot in the shoulder, not the leg."

Marty smiled. "Unzip your suit, smart ass."

Emma did so as she looked down at her father's things, too numb to process what she had seen as reality. Time travel and her dad gunned down all in one night? She was trying to breathe in a vacuum, and it was too much. Maybe if she said it to herself enough it would be more real. _My dad was killed. He was shot by terrorists._ Right now, those words only put a knot in her stomach. In time, when it properly sank in and the shock and adrenaline had worn off, the dam would break. She knew that. But right now, it was too fresh and too improbable to seem real.

Still, seeing Marty fold one her dad's long, white sock into a thick square and shake out one of his button-downs made the knot in her stomach tighten uncomfortably.

"You're gonna have to help me get out of this thing," she said breathlessly, swinging her legs out of the car. Holding her left arm as still as possible, she stood with little difficulty. Marty laid the shirt and sock aside and stood up behind her, reaching around for the two halves of the suit at her neck.

"Do you want to do this one arm at a time?"

"I think it's loose enough that it'll slide right off."

Marty pulled back, and Emma's breath hitched as the material peeled away from the injury. She heard Marty make a repulsive noise in the back of his throat. Thankfully, he withheld his comments and eased the cuffs of the sleeves over her wrists. From there, the suit fell around her knees, and Emma stepped out of it.

"There." Marty collected her suit and pitched it into the DeLorean as she sat down on the doorjamb. "Can you turn your shoulder towards me?"

"Uh, yeah. Here."

She slid to one side and turned, giving him access to the wound. Lightheaded, she shut her eyes, grimacing at the sour taste snaking up her throat.

"Hurry up before I pass out."

Marty sat on the doorjamb next to her, moving her ponytail aside to get his first real look at it. His suspicions had been correct; it was far worse under the suit. The tiny navy and teal horizontal stripes of her shirt were indiscernible because of the opaque mass spreading through its threads. The dark, wet shine covered the entire upper part of her left sleeve and traveled over a good portion of her shoulder blade. Finding the blackest spot in her arm just below the socket, he put one hand on her back to steady them both as he pressed the sock over it. Emma whimpered.

"Sorry," he said, guiltily pressing harder. "Can you reach around and hold this?"

"Yeah."

"It might be easier to go under your arm," Marty said, and she redirected her hand. He took her fingers, guiding them up to the sock. "There. Keep that pressure on it."

Emma let her head touch the car as Marty tore the sleeve from the shirt. "I don't think going into a hospital like this is a good idea."

"You're in excruciating pain, bleeding out with a bullet lodged in your shoulder," Marty grunted, tugging at the sleeve aggressively. "Isn't this the kind of thing you go to a hospital _for_?"

"Not in 1955."

"What? People don't get shot in Mayberry?"

"Okay," Emma said as the sleeve ripped fully from the shirt, "how were you going to explain how I got shot?"

Marty faltered at her question, tossing the remainder of Doc's shirt back at the suitcase. 'Shot by Libyans,' 'drive-by,' and 'science experiment gone wrong' didn't exactly sound right to begin with, and now that he _did_ think about it, there _wasn't_ a good reason to go into a 1950s hospital with a gunshot wound unless they were criminals on the run. The medical field wasn't as advanced, they'd try to open some investigation…

"Well, what's your idea then?" he asked, flattening the sleeve and looping it under her arm. "You can't walk around like this."

"Just tie it off for now," she said, stiffening as he tightened a knot over the sock. "We have to make it into town first before we can do anything."

Marty stood up and took his orange vest off, followed by his denim jacket. When Emma was up, he motioned for her to turn around.

"Put this on." He started working the sleeve up her left arm. "It'll cover your shoulder so no one's freaking out when they see you."

After a good bit of patience, effort, and sharp inhales, Emma had Marty's jacket on. He reinstated his orange vest before piling their belongings into the DeLorean and throwing several large branches over it to hide its gleam in the sunlight from passing motorists. Emma waited by the road, hardening her mentality so that she could make the two-mile walk without having to resort to Marty carrying her. When he came around from behind the billboard, he stuck his hands in his pockets, and, side-by-side, they started up the road.

* * *

They wandered into Hill Valley, Marty slowly digesting everything around him. The cars, the clothes, the buildings and signs – everything was different, living against the backdrop of the life and times he came from. When they stopped under the movie theater marquee, Emma calmly looked around, assessing the situation with her lips pressed firmly together.

She expected this. She watched the experiment work once, and under the same conditions with the time circuits set to a different date and time, they were part of the second successful experiment. If anything, it was more successful; they had a dog travel over one minute, but she and Marty had just travelled over thirty years. So, from a scientific standpoint, it was incredible.

They just had the misfortune of… being interrupted… before the plutonium chamber was refilled.

"Come on," he said, leading her across the street.

Emma looked up for her bench, surprised to see how pristine everything before her really was. The town square was no longer a dead, gray void of metered parking and abundant litter for the court house officials; it was bright with perfect green grass, uniform hedges, and beautiful lush trees. A cannon and war memorial were at its center, an artist just off to the side with his easel and canvas. The courthouse looked not to have a chip or scuff on it anywhere, and when the clock gave a loud, resounding chime, she and Marty exchanged looks.

"I need to sit down," she said as he snatched a newspaper from a waste bin. She started to head for her bench – now as green and smooth as the square – when Marty grabbed her elbow, throwing away the newspaper and pointing towards the mint green corner café.

"You can sit down in there."

"Oh, good. I'm starving."

Marty kept Emma at his side as they crossed the street and slowly entered the aerobics-center-turned-café.

_Café-turned-aerobics-center?_

Irrelevant.

The large windows that usually harbored a view of women high-stepping in leotards were lined with teal green booths and a jukebox playing from the back wall. The shiny mint green of the exterior echoed throughout the café -the base of the large wrap-around counter, the stools, the walls. The floors looked like a blanket woven in Albuquerque, patterned with faded red and blue triangles and black lines on a tawny backdrop. The lights above the bar were akin to melting milk jugs – boxy, white wax that tapered to a point.

Backlit signs hung behind the bar advertising shakes, sundaes, and pie, and several large, wooden painted shapes of similar items were mounted on the walls. Small jars of candies, peanuts, and sprinkles for ice cream were on display next to the malt shakers. Clear and green glasses were aligned neatly on the shelves, all of the coffee cups with their handles facing the same direction. A man in a grey-blue jacket and a woman in a yellow dress sat at the front portion of the counter while a young man swept around them quietly.

Emma smiled at the woman behind the candy counter off to her right, eyes roaming over the vintage logos of the candy bars she passed every few days in the 7-11.

"Hey, kid, what'd you do? Jump ship? What's with the life preserver?"

She and Marty looked up at the man behind the counter, none other than who she presumed to be Lou himself. Marty was silent, clearly lost. Emma didn't blame him; there wasn't really a logical answer to the question.

"Breaking in new equipment for the Coast Guard," she said suddenly, patting Marty's 'life preserver' with a tight smile. He shot her a look. "Makes the family proud."

"Is that right? Thanks for serving," Lou said. "Can I get you something?"

Marty wet his lips. "I just want to use the phone."

Emma turned her head sharply. "Who do you know in 1955?" she whispered.

"Your dad."

Her eyes grew as she leaned away, and he nodded before glancing towards the counter.

"Go sit down and get something to eat. I'll be right out."

Swallowing the unexpected bitter taste in her mouth, she forced a smile and approached the counter as Marty headed over to the phone booth. Gingerly taking the stool next to the young man in the jacket, she smiled up at Lou, hoping to rid her mouth of the horrible sour fizzle.

"Cherry pie, please."  
Lou gave her a look but headed down the bar. Emma smoothed her hands over the cool, white, glossy countertop in wait, smiling at the boy beside her when their eyes met briefly. He returned it, lowering his head again to his bowl of cereal and magazine. Lou returned with her pie and fork, setting a glass of milk in front of the boy.

"Would you like something to drink?"

"No, thank you."

As Emma picked up her fork and debated at which end of the slice she should start, the boy reached for his milk without looking up. He knocked it over.

A great milky flood flowed over the countertop, and the cup rolled off the back edge of the counter, smashing to the floor. Emma jumped from her stool just before the milk could run into her lap. She frowned as it claimed her slice of pie, the flaky crust now soggy from soaking up the milk. Lou was back in an instant, and the boy was shoving his things down to the opposite end of the bar.

"Oh. Oh, I'm so sorry," he said immediately, grabbing the towel Lou offered him. He fumbled around his bowl of cereal, clumsily spreading the towel over the mess. "I'm so sorry. I—Are you okay? Did I get any on you?"

Emma took a wad of napkins from the dispenser, pushing them into the stool with her good arm. She almost laughed. She had blood caked on her shirt under Marty's jacket, black smudges all over her white pants, and her hair was in a tussled ponytail.

"You couldn't have done much more damage if you did."

"Goldie! Help them clean this up!"

The young man with broom came over, and, excusing himself, laid his broom against the counter and squeezed in to where Emma had been sitting, wiping down the counter with skilled speed. Emma stood off to the side, and the boy swiveled around on his stool, half-afraid to look her in the eye.

"I really am sorry about your pie. I should have been paying more attention," he murmured, fiddling with the edge of his jacket. "Can I get you another?"

Emma felt bad. This overly apologetic boy was making every effort to deliver the refreshing chivalry of the fifties, but his hunched shoulders, withering voice, and lack of eye contact took away from the charm of the experience. All the same, she smiled.

"It's okay. It's just a piece of pie."

"Em?"

Emma turned around as Marty came up to her and surveyed the scene. Goldie finished with the countertop and its edge, and Lou nodded to her, placing a fresh slice of pie at her stool and a new glass of milk in front of the boy.

"What happened?"

"Just a spill. Everything's alright now."

Marty glanced up at the young man in the jacket. Flustered, the boy at the counter took one look at him and swiveled back around, carefully moving his milk to the other side of his cereal, away from Emma and her piece of pie lest he knock it over again. He buried his face in his magazine as Emma returned to the counter. Marty sat beside her, trying to get another look at this boy with the Corn Flakes.

"Who is that?"

"That's –" Emma paused, touching the young man's arm. He jumped.

"What?"

"I'm sorry," Emma said. "What is your name?"

"Hey, McFly, what do you think you're doing?"

All at once, the three teenagers at the counter turned towards the door – one confused, one curious, and one wishing a wormhole would manifest out of the air around him and swallow him wholly out of his miserable existence.

A teenage Biff Tannen stood in the doorway of Lou's Cafe with his cronies. Emma exchanged a fiercely confused glance with Marty until she realized that Biff was bearing down on the poor kid next to her, and subsequently, who the poor kid next to her was. As Biff heckled him about his homework, she looked back at Marty wide-eyed with a small smile of intrigue, but Marty had tunnel vision. The realization didn't seem so much fascinating as it was unbelievable to him.

George McFly. She was sitting next to Marty's future father.

And nearly getting knocked in the face with the Hill Valley's biggest asshole's elbow.

She blinked indignantly and leaned back towards Marty to avoid it as Biff knocked George on the head and grabbed his face, his three cohorts guffawing around them. Before she was even aware of it, words were leaving her mouth.

"Hey, stop it!"

Biff halted, releasing George's shirt. All eyes were suddenly on her. A flash of fear crossed Emma's face as he turned to her. Biff Tannen had lost a beer gut and gained a lot of muscles, making him seem much taller than she remember him being in 1985. She tried to sit tall, her shoulder screaming.

Biff snarled at her. "What's it to you, sweet cheeks?"

"Please don't hit him anymore."

"You volunteering to take it for him?"

In that instant, Marty put his arm in front of Emma, redirecting Biff's glare to himself. "Don't touch her."

"Who are you supposed to be?" 3-D laughed. "Her boyfriend?"

A chorus of more guffaws came as another of them said, "Hey, if this guy's bothering you, sweetheart, we can fix that."

"I'm not her boyfriend," Marty said a little too quickly. Emma glanced at the floor, and his heart sank a little. It had become such a reflex around his band mates. And in the face of this brawny, bullying Biff Tannen, he swallowed, embarrassed at how soft-spoken his response was. "I'm her brother."

Biff pouted at Emma as their chortles continued. "I'm sorry to hear that you're related to such a dork. Do you have a matching life preserver?"

Marty beat Emma's sharp tongue by grabbing her wrist to silence her oncoming retort. She stewed angrily as Biff and his gang rounded George once more about Biff's homework and smacked him in the face. Biff caught Emma's wince out of the corner of his eye and winked. Finally, they left with the parting threat of never seeing George in the café again, jumping into the black convertible right outside the front window.

Emma sighed, trying to let go of the frustration pent up in her chest now that they were gone. She leaned next to Marty's head, whispering in a hiss and removing her hand from his abruptly.

"You're my _brother_?"

The busboy Goldie came up to George, trying to give him a pep talk. Marty overheard the gist of it, but with Emma staring him down, he just held out his hands, trying to keep his voice down.

"What did you want me to say?"

"You didn't have to say anything!"

"He was threatening you!"

"Not that! Of course you say something about that."

"Would you have rather been my cousin?"

Emma rolled her eyes. Marty made a face.

"What? _What_?"

Emma leaned away, putting an end to their frenzied whispering and taking a mildly aggressive stab at her new slice of pie. Marty shook his head, startled to see that the stool beyond her was now empty. He sat up, eyes darting about as Emma stuffed another thick slice of pie into her mouth.

"Where did he go?"

A bicycle bell came from outside. Marty leapt from his stool, watching his not-yet-father ride up one side of the building and down the other. He grabbed Emma by the wrist, pulling her off the stool with cherry pie still in her mouth. He ran out the door with her, yelling after George. When Emma finally swallowed her pie, Marty had her by the wrist again.

"Come on!"

"Marty! What are we doing?"

"We're gonna lose him!"

**. Please Review .**


	5. Grandfather Paradox

**CHAPTER FOUR  
**_**Grandfather Paradox**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
9:55 AM

Marty led them in a short run several blocks away. By that time, Emma tasted the buttery crust and sweet tartness of the cherry pie again, her head spinning from pain and nausea.

"This way."

"Marty, I can't," she panted, now cradling her left arm. "I have to sit down. I'm going to be sick."

She slid down the trunk of a nearby tree to the ground, resting her forehead on her knees. She turned away from the street, her good shoulder pressed into the course bark. The bullet wound pumped sweat to her brow. She shut her eyes, trying to breathe evenly.

Marty felt his stomach knot with guilt at the sight of her. Enough was enough. He shouldn't have let it go this long; she had a goddamn bullet in her, and he had to get her to a hospital. He paced the sidewalk next to her ready to suggest as much when he noticed the bike propped up against the other side of the tree – George's bike.

Marty stepped towards the street earnestly in search of his father. He was nowhere to been seen up and down and across the street, but at the hint of a few falling leaves, Marty looked up, surprised to see his father lying on a tree branch. With binoculars.

Marty followed the binoculars' line of sight to the top floor of the house directly across the street and glanced between the top right window and his father a few times. A young woman's torso was visible through the bright green treetop edging the window. Very visible, in fact – she wore only her undergarments, white as the window frame and curtains surrounding her. Marty glanced between the girl's adjustments and his dad's eager crawl further up the limb. Realizing just what he was witnessing was yet another moment in Marty's life where he was not proud of the scrawny guy above him. Marty made a face somewhere between disgust and disappointment as more leaves fell from overhead.

"He's a Peeping Tom!"

Emma's eyes fluttered open from the other side of the tree. She tried to shift in the direction of Marty's voice. "Who is?"

Just then, George dropped out of the tree and into the middle of the street on all fours. Emma started at his materialization, glancing from him to the tree limb to Marty in quick succession. She placed her hand against the trunk to stand, and halfway there, Marty's voice broke over the peaceful suburban street.

"Dad!"

Followed by a car horn.

She didn't hear herself shriek; she felt her shoulder pain buckle her knees as one hand grabbed the tree and the other flew to her mouth. In the span of time it took her to blink, Marty had raced into the street towards his father, pushed the awkward kid to the other curb, and unsuccessfully braced himself into the hood of the moving car. Marty backpedalled from the force until he was on the ground, the sound of his head bouncing off the asphalt making Emma's stomach drop.

"Marty!"

Dogs barked from neighboring yards. Sky and trees meshed with crooked houses. He lifted his head in her direction. It lingered momentarily, eyes clouded as she hurried to him. Before she could reach him, however, his head dropped to the pavement once more.

"Marty! Oh my god!"

Emma knelt, her hands trembling slightly as she checked the back of Marty's head.

"Marty, please, please, wake up," she murmured, lifting one of his eyelids. She patted his chest gingerly, then took a fistful of his shirt and shook more vigorously.

"Marty!"

"Is he breathing?"

Emma looked up at the portly man standing over her. "Yeah, he's breathing, but he won't wake up," she rattled out without taking her own breath. "He was standing right there and –"

"Hey, wait a minute! Who are you?"

George stumbled past them in a daze, his face flush with adrenaline. He met Emma's eyes once, and they silently apologized with a glance from Marty's motionless body to her wide eyes. Emma's shoulders fell in disbelief when he turned his bike around and sped away. She made to shout after him in desperation, but the gentleman's hand touched her injured shoulder, and a cry leapt from her throat instead.

Sam Baines stepped back. "What's the matter with you?" he asked incredulously. "You were clear over there!"

"Oh for goodness sakes, Sam, what happened this time?"

Emma slowly unfolded herself, biting her lip to stay the tears in her eyes. A pair of tidy red women's loafers approached from the other side of Marty. The owner, a homey woman, stout like her husband, rested her hands on her hips with a sigh and shook her head at the scene before her.

"He came out of nowhere, Stella!" Sam said, gesturing wildly at Marty. "Him and her and some other kid that took off down the street!"

"Honestly, Sam…"

"Don't you kids know to look both ways before you cross the street?"

"Sam."

The man withheld further complaints with a wary eye at Emma, ultimately offering his hand. Emma swallowed, carefully accepting with her right hand. A grimace flooded her face regardless, and she pulled her left arm into her chest when the Baines stooped to get Marty to his feet. The cherry pie hit the back of her tongue. As Sam and Stella fixed one of Marty's arms around each of them, she shut her eyes again to dispel the vertigo.

"Is this young man your brother?"

Emma opened her eyes, heart hammering.

"Ye-yes."

"Aw, well then, you come inside with us, honey," Stella said. "Come on, now. We'll take care of him."

Emma hesitantly followed. She looked down the street in the direction in which George had taken off and back to Marty's head swinging lifelessly between his shoulders. Nearing the door, she inhaled as much of the cool morning air as she could to settle her scattered wits before Stella ushered her inside a living room wallpapered with tiny bunches of blue flowers and family pictures.

"Milton! Toby! Come help your father!"

Emma finally calmed her psyche enough with one last deep breath, the scent of brown sugar, cigars, and freshly pressed clothes hitting the bottom of her lungs. Two boys came running around the corner with a little girl in tow, the tallest in a coonskin cap. The younger boy's mouth fell open.

"Wow, Dad! What'd you do?"

"I didn't do anything," Sam repeated sternly. "He ran in front of the car. Grab his leg, Toby."

"Did you kill him?"

The girl pouted. "Daddy killed him?"

"No, sweetheart, Daddy didn't kill anybody," Stella reassured gently, touching the girl's light tresses. "It was just an accident. We're going to let him rest, then he'll be good as new."

_Thud_.

The three girls looked up the stairs sharply. Sam guided the boys in maneuvering Marty's head out of a baluster.

"Watch it, Milton."

"Toby did it!"

Stella frowned at her husband, to which he grumbled "We're going, Stella," through gritted teeth. "Watch the corner, boys. Get under his knee there. Sally? His shoe fell off. Pick that up for me."

Stella Baines cast the disheveled girl next to the plant stand an apologetic look. Her blonde hair was poking out of a ponytail in odd tufts, her pants were stained with brown and gray streaks, and the oversized denim jacket she sported made her face look frailer and paler than she probably would otherwise. If she hadn't been there right after it had happened, Stella would have thought this poor girl was the victim of Sam's negligent driving, not the boy currently being toted upstairs.

Ever the model hostess, Stella gave Emma a kind smile, her hands clasped neatly in front of her.

"There is another bed upstairs if you care to rest, too. Or you can sit in the family room over here."

Sam, Toby, and Milton continued to grumble at one another as they disappeared up to the next landing, little Sally in tow with Marty's shoe. Emma glanced up the stairs after them while horribly sour cherries still burned the back of her throat, Stella waiting patiently for her reply. Blinking back her nausea, Emma swallowed, slowly nodding once at the stairs.

"I'd like to stay with my brother. Make sure he's okay."

"Of course," Stella practically cooed, touching her arm. "It's right up at the top of the stairs here."

As feather-light as Mrs. Baines's touch had been, the nerves in Emma's shoulder lit up. She bit her lip, quickly moving directly behind the woman to hide the pained twist of her features. Gingerly holding her left arm against herself again, Emma ascended the stairs behind Stella as casually as she could.

The last to reach the top landing, Emma followed everyone into the door off to the right. She stepped to the left of Mrs. Baines as her husband and three children fixed Marty under the large comforter of the nearest bed. Emma's stomach flipped all over again seeing him in such a state. She'd seen him unconscious twice before, but both instances were hardly as upsetting as this. He had come to almost immediately those other times.

This unresponsiveness made her want to snap a rubber band right between his eyes. That would wake him up.

"Take his other shoe off, Sally."

The little girl untied Marty's shoe and took it off, placing it at the foot of the bed with the one that had fallen off on their way upstairs. When the two boys and Mr. Baines had him settled, Emma silently approached the bedside. She looked him over gravely, willing him to open his eyes.

_Stuck in 1955 and you get hit by a car. _

_Wake up, you big sissy._

From the other side of the bed, Mrs. Baines came into her peripheral vision with a damp washcloth and bowl of water. She squeezed the excess water from the cloth and carefully dabbed his brow, frowning at the bruise blossoming just along his hairline. Emma stared at it, wondering how on earth he had received a bruise there when he has fallen backward.

Then she remembered Marty's head greeted nearly every baluster up to the bedroom.

"It's not too bad," Stella assured, seeing Emma's stony expression. "I'm sure he'll sleep it off. Maybe not without a good headache, but I think we can assume it could have been much worse."

Emma mentally let out an exasperated sigh. Who was she to say it wasn't? You weren't supposed to let people with head trauma just_ go to sleep_. He probably had a concussion from as hard as his head had bounced. Bleeding? Memory loss? Those could just be discounted, too, because the nice homemaker put him to bed and said so?

Emma practically glowered at Marty. _If this is your sad attempt to get me to the hospital…it might work_, she admitted to herself. Her knees felt weak again.

"Oh, dear, you look so pale," Stella said, putting the bowl and washcloth on the small nightstand between the two beds. "I would be, too, if I had been through what you have."

If Stella Baines had truly had any idea of just what Emma had been through in the last twelve hours, Emma was sure that the woman would faint on the spot. But as it was Emma who stood a great chance of fainting herself, she didn't object to Stella's offer of rest; she shuffled over to the other bed wordlessly and sat on its edge.

"There now."

Amongst the bowl on the nightstand, two small, white porcelain swans and a box of tissues fell silent as the tall lampshade above them darkened with the pull of a chain. The handful of framed pictures on the wall became faceless, and the layers of wispy white curtains behind her stilled once Stella moved a few of the smaller pillows to the end of the bed. Emma adjusted the ones that remained as Mrs. Baines smiled from the doorway.

"Get some rest, dear. We'll check on your brother in a bit."

Emma couldn't tell if she had expressed her thanks aloud before Mrs. Baines closed the door, but the moment she had, Emma squeezed her eyes shut as her cheek touched the pillow, curling onto her right side.

Her injured shoulder throbbed angrily above her. A few shaky exhales trembled out of her. A small sniffle. She had never felt such searing, mind-numbing pain before, not even when the welding torch got her leg a few years ago. She tried focusing on parts of her body that were uninjured, but this bullet wound was all-encompassing, refusing to be ignored. It made her temples scream, the space between her shoulder blades stabbed with each breath.

Emma looked at Marty, the few clumps of damp hair at his brow poking out like odd shadows in the dim room. She was briefly jealous of his unconscious state; he could escape this awful reality without memory for a while and wake believing he had dreamt it all.

And with such terrible pain exhausting her, Emma's heavy limbs and gentled heartbeat were a welcomed gift as she slowly fell out of the whirlwind of her waking world. Her eyelids touched and opened; touched, opened. She watched Marty's chest rise and fall with soft exhales and matched them, soon fast asleep.

* * *

A cool autumn thundershower moved over Hill Valley sometime in the late afternoon. Rain fell steadily over the grayed town, coursing along metal gutters and trickling through the foliage of trees to the damp earth below. Small streams of water ran along the streets and sidewalks outside the Baines residence, and while dusk was not very far off, the streetlights came on earlier than they normally would have.

Emma's wound roused her with a moderate ache, but then a sudden, hot stab sent her gasping into the pillow. She took a few calming breaths, listening to the leaves brush rainwater against the window. Her eyes opened on Marty weakly; he was still out like a light. As much as she just wanted to go back to sleep until he woke up, it was apparent that the bullet hole in her shoulder wasn't going to let her.

Sliding her feet to the floor and using great amounts of effort to get upright through the pain, Emma stood at Marty's bedside, casting an uneasy frown over him. She moved his tuft of brown hair aside with the back of her hand, and even in the poor lighting, she could make out the bruised spot high on his forehead. Her fingertips grazed it tenderly; it wasn't as badly swollen as she had anticipated. It was more so the back of his head that concerned her, the split-second image of it hitting the pavement replaying in her mind.

She sighed, letting his hair fall back over his brow.

_You are so stupid sometimes._

Marty said nothing.

She lingered another thirty seconds before wondering if the Baines kept Tylenol; if memory served from health class last year, 1955 was the year an acetaminophen suspension was released for children, but the drug wasn't going to be a staple in the American home for a while yet. Besides, a bottle of that elixir would probably be a drop in the bucket towards relieving her pain.

Once they found her father and got home, she would relent and go to the hospital if her dad and Marty hadn't carried her there first.

Emma ventured over to the white oak bedroom door, quietly turning the knob. As she looked up to peer out into the hallway, she started; a young woman's face was inches from hers just on the other side of the door. She leaned back in surprise, batting her wide, pretty eyes shyly.

"Hi. I was just coming to check on you and," - she craned her neck to try and see past Emma, a sweet, breathy sigh on her words – "your brother."

Emma nodded once, eyeing her.

"My name is Lorraine."

And there it was – the odd sense of familiarity that was beating her over the head suddenly had a name, and Emma's eyes grew slightly.

Marty's mother! What were the chances that they had encountered both of Marty's parents in the same day, let alone it being the very day her father had punched into the keypad of the time circuits as the day he invented time travel?

She had only met Mrs. McFly a handful of times, usually when Marty took a rare turn in having her over to work on their school projects at his house. In those brief encounters, Emma was sometimes within earshot when Mr. McFly called his wife by her first name. And while thirty years and fifty pounds had definitely transformed the woman, her face was unmistakable. So many of her young, soft features reminded her of Marty in an instant, and Emma almost laughed at how absurd this day was turning out to be. She wouldn't speculate for fear of what might happen, but anything seemed possible.

"I'm Emma," she managed. "Do you know what time it is?"

"It's almost 8:30," Lorraine said, glancing over at the nearby clock on the wall. "I wanted to see if you were both awake. We're about to have a late dinner."

Oh, sweet merciful heavens, she could smell the meatloaf and buttered rolls as if Lorraine were holding them right under her nose. She suddenly became aware of how hungry she was; she hadn't eaten anything proper in nearly twenty-four hours, save for those two or three bites of pie. And despite how ill the pain from her shoulder had her, she was certain she could tuck away a good meal without hesitation right now, feel even worse later, and regret nothing.

Emma stepped back, opening the door a little wider for Lorraine to enter. "He's still asleep."

Lorraine stood in the dark doorway, tightening her sweater around herself as she stared at the boy in her sister's bed, intrigued.

"Oh. Well, go on down to dinner. I just finished helping set the table."

Emma went out into the hallway, turning back to see that, instead of following, Lorraine had retreated further into the dark bedroom.

"Aren't you coming?"

"I'll be down in a minute," Lorraine assured her, closing the door so that only her face was poking through with an overly polite smile. "I just want to make sure he's doing alright."

Emma stared. Was she really getting kicked out of the bedroom where _her_ friend was unconscious and hurt? By his future mother? Did she somehow know it was her son?

Whatever it was, she was acting strange enough for tiny red flags to pop up in the back of Emma's mind. She felt the urge to rush back into the room and assert herself as Marty's liaison and caretaker. It was some juvenile jealousy doing this to her, and although she scolded herself, she knew that if had been Jennifer Parker edging her out of the room instead of his future mother, she would have a lot more to say.

"You should get some meatloaf as soon as it's sliced," Lorraine suggested. "And the mashed potatoes before Milton eats them all."

Oh. Food.

Marty was fine.

"Thanks."

Awkwardly starting downstairs by herself, Emma's straightened when she heard the bedroom door shut. Part of her wasn't really sure what just happened, but it sent more red flags up in the distance.

Just as she made up her mind to go back for Marty and strongly suggest that they had to leave, the two boys that had helped carry him upstairs with their father that morning came out of a different bedroom, galloping towards her. They paused their horseplay when they saw her in the middle of the stairs, but it didn't seem to deter them; the smaller boy beamed at her.

"Are you staying for dinner?"

Emma gave a small smile. "That's where I'm headed."

"Come on, then!" Toby said, leading her and Milton downstairs to the dining room. "Mom! This girl's awake! She said she's staying for dinner!"

Stella came round from the kitchen with a perfect meatloaf in hand. Emma felt blissfully happy as the heavy, savory steam knocked her between the eyes. She returned Mrs. Baines's smile genuinely.

"That… smells amazing."

"Tastes even better," Stella winked, setting it on the table. "Come sit down and help yourself. As you can see from the way my boys eat, I've made plenty."

Toby hurried to pull up an extra chair, and Emma could hardly take her eyes off the table as she sat down. Platters and bowls and dishes spanned the whole of the tabletop in a picturesque display. Within two minutes, Emma had a full plate. And by the time she'd realized Marty was taking a seat next to her, half her slice of meatloaf and most of the mashed potatoes were gone. Her fork hovered over her plate when she caught Marty eyeing her. She swallowed without breaking eye contact; she was not going to apologize for enjoying this meal or the glob or gravy in the corner of her mouth.

"You know, Marty, you look so familiar," Stella said. "Do I know your mother?"

Marty and Emma both sat straight at this, Emma busying herself with wiping her mouth so her eyes couldn't dart to Lorraine as Marty's had.

"Yeah, I think maybe you do."

"Oh, then I want to give her a call. I don't want her to worry about the two of you."

"You can't. That is…nobody's home."

"Oh."

"Yet."

"Oh."

Emma raised an eyebrow at her 'brother' during a long sip of milk. Marty could see a hint of amusement in her face as she lowered the glass, forced to smile into her napkin at the increasing exasperation of his level brow. Having won round two of their awkward staring contests in front of his future relatives, Marty was about to slip the telephone book page from his pocket he had taken from Lou's that morning when Lorraine spoke up.

"Mother, with their parents out of town, don't you think they ought to spend the night? After all, Dad almost killed him with the car."

Emma leaned forward, just now realizing how close Lorraine was to Marty. She gripped her fork.

"That's true," Stella considered. "I think you should spend the night. I think you're our responsibility."

"I don't know…"

"Marty can sleep in my room."

Immediately, Marty leapt backwards from the table, nearly knocking his chair over. Before she could even glare at him, Marty yanked Emma up by her good arm. She stumbled, ungracefully catching herself on little Joey's playpen.

"We gotta go! We gotta go, right Em?"

"Yeah," she agreed blindly as Marty marched her to the door by the small of her back. "Time to go."

"That's right! Time to go. Thanks very much, it was wonderful, you were all great, see you all later," he said, pushing Emma out the door. "_Much_ later."

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	6. Suspended Animation

**CHAPTER FIVE  
**_**Suspended Animation**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
9:22 PM

Marty continued dragging Emma down the street until they were out of sight of and still another block past the Baines' house. Emma demanded to know if he had a good reason for hauling her out of there before she even got to grab a roll for the road, and after Marty's curt explanation of his mother's not-so-motherly touch, she backed off.

"Damn! I meant to ask them where Riverside Drive was."

"Riverside?"

"Yeah, look." He took out the phonebook page from that morning and shared it with Emma, pointing to Doc's listed address. Emma laughed, handing the page back to him almost immediately.

"That's the mansion's address. Riverside was renamed for Kennedy not long after the place burned down and Dad sold the land."

"So we're looking for a mansion."

"_Ding ding ding._"

Marty slowed his speed walk to that of a leisurely stroll lest Emma collapse against another tree. He wasn't exactly sure how she had made it through the day without her shoulder bleeding through his jacket, but he was also glad that wasn't the case. She plodded along beside him expressionlessly, maybe on the verge of a stumble here or there. Her posture was normal, but Marty could see the weight of everything settling on her that much more.

"How are you holding up, Em?"

"I'll be fine until we get to my dad's. The rest and food really helped."

It was dumb to ask if she was in a lot of pain. He could see her hiding it ever since the parking lot, and she was doing a hell of a job. She was right to call him a big sissy sometimes; she handled pain way better than he did, but he'd never tell her that.

But as they turned a corner under the soft rustle of an overhead oak tree, the street lamps gave away her grimace.

"I'm sorry about, you know," – he jerked his head over his shoulder – "back there."

"For what?"

"Well, they are my family. I just feel like I should apologize for them for anything."

Emma smiled. "Your family was fine. If you're going to apologize for anything, apologize for jumping in front of a car and scaring me half to death."

It was Marty's turn to smile. "I scared you?"

"You _jumped in front of a moving vehicle_," Emma chided. "Then proceeded to remain unconscious, essentially leaving me by myself in 1955."

"I had good reason."

"Yeah, and it might have killed you. _I_ was going to kill you if you had woken up with no memory. Do I need to get you a leash?"

"Chill out, Em. Everything's fine."

She gave him a look that made him recoil slightly.

"Okay, so everything _will be_ fine. Once we see your dad."

_Once we see your dad._

God, what was that going to be like? Granted, it hadn't completely sunk in that the last eighteen hours had been reality, least of all losing Doc in such a violent way. He was battling to process everything, let alone what Emma must be trying to talk herself through.

It was going to be the biggest relief to reach Doc. They were in the clear once they had him. Maybe it would feel like nothing had happened at all when they knocked on his door. It will have all been a nightmare.

_Why can't it all just be nightmare?_

"Marty."

He stopped. Emma had crossed the street, the sign above her head embossed with gold letters that read RIVERSIDE.

"Look both ways, stupid," she called as he jogged over to her. He matched her slow pace, pushing his hands into his pockets. He clutched the lining up in his fists absentmindedly, his right forefinger grazing a penny.

"Em, has it hit you yet?"

"What? About my dad?"

"…Everything."

She sighed, not looking up. Pieces of her long bangs freed themselves from her ponytail in the light wind, brushing across her face. "No. And to be honest, I don't think the feeling will pass anytime soon."

"Did you maybe want to wait while I talked to him?"

Emma shook her head. She appreciated what he was saying, but part of her had to see her father, even if he wasn't her father yet, and even if it was just to look at him.

"He's not my dad yet," she repeated aloud to herself.

Marty raised an eyebrow. "I guess not yet."

"He can't know I'm his daughter then."

"What?"

"Marty, it's 1955. Whether he buys this time travel thing or not, announcing I'm his daughter isn't going to be a good idea."

"Oh, come on," Marty said. "He'll work ten times harder to get us home by morning if you told him."

"He could also not like me and decide not to have kids."

"Really?"

"I do have my mother's attitude. And if memory serves, she is his least favorite person right now." She groaned in frustration. "I know I don't sound like I'm making any sense. It's complicated, Marty. And it's safer if he doesn't know yet."

Marty nodded his understanding. "So, you're just a lackey around the lab like me?"

She blew a raspberry. "No, I'm an assistant. I'm not a lackey."

"Excuuuuse me."

* * *

A few minutes later, a glowing box that read 1640 appeared along the sidewalk. Eyes following a grand brick driveway beyond it, the Brown Mansion towered from a small hilltop that dwarfed the garage they both called home in 1985. Lit with lights from an impeccably well-kept expanse of lawn, the rich architecture, warm lighting, and commanding grandeur of the place drew silent awe from its onlookers.

Marty glanced over at Emma's bright curiosity, nudging her until she acknowledged him amidst her captivation. She'd seen pictures from before the fire, yes, but pictures didn't do this place justice.

"Ready?"

"As I can be."

Marty lead the way, mindful of Emma's determination not to baby her arm as they ascended the long, curved pathway. A large stone stoop welcomed them before a heavy wooden and stained glass door. Emma reached out, touching the cool, elaborate moldings. Marty's sharp knocking pulled her out of her trancelike wonder, and she turned around with him to look out over the street.

"You have got to be pissed that this place burned down," Marty said, taking in the wide yard and flowering trees. "Hell, _I'm_ a little pissed."

Emma shrugged. "What are you gonna do, you know?"

"Suggest he call an electrician and get the wires checked?"

The door flew open suddenly.

Marty and Emma spun around, catching a glimpse of who they assumed to be Doc probing his wild eyes through the crack at them before slamming the door shut again. Intrigued and startled alike, the two of them stepped toward the door in unison. Emma tried to squint through the stained glass pane to make out any kind of shape or shadow beyond it as Marty leaned toward the doorjamb hesitantly.

"Doc?"

The door again flew open, all the way this time, and Marty and Emma drew back in surprise. After she shook the sting from her eyes by the sudden barrage of the indoor lighting, Emma came face-to-face with a middle-aged Emmett Brown, a shockingly large cage-like thing strapped to his head. His eyes were as wide and wild as ever, and before she or Marty even had a chance to draw a breath to speak, Doc grabbed each of them by their jackets and yanked them inside.

"Don't say a word."

* * *

Emma dizzily came to a standstill as the door was slammed, trying to get her bearings. Her father was thirty years younger, nearly unrecognizable aside from what little personality they had just experienced. His cottony hair was shorter and light blond, and his hands weren't nearly as calloused or cracked as she'd known them to be. His casual luau shirts and khakis were a thing of the future; he looked so straight-laced with a tie and tucked-in shirt. His cuffs were even buttoned. Outrageous headgear aside, he almost looked alien to her.

Then there was the matter of this _silver snakeskin robe._

Yep. Everything was going to be okay.

She stumbled over a thick, red rug carpeting the smoky foyer after Marty and her young father. Dying plants hung amidst glossy wooden panels and crossbeams, intricate stained glass lamps, and a scattered assortment of blueprints, tools, and random odds and ends. Her dad led them over to a crude, haphazardly stacked pillar of knobs, wiring, scrap metal, and dials emitting the foul-smelling electrical burn and frighteningly healthy _zaps_. Coupled with the nausea from her pain, she felt herself grow pale and lightheaded.

But it was impossible to look away from that contraption on the top her father's head.

"I don't want to know anything about you!"

"Doc!"

"Quiet!"

She glanced at the dog not unlike Einstein as he was unhooked from a smaller, less impressive head unit and jumped into a riveted leather armchair behind them. She redirected herself back to the sprawling thing on her dad's head, standing right next to him as she examined the vacuum tube heavily wrapped in electrical tape that ran down his back and into the misshapen, sizzling tower. She suddenly realized what this Neanderthal of an invention was, narrowing her eyes as Doc silenced Marty's protesting with a blue, wired suction cup to the forehead.

"I'm gonna read your thoughts," Doc announced, pointing at Marty. He reached over to the top of the crackling scrap pile, suddenly jerking his head away from a hollow tapping next to his left ear. He scowled at the girl next to him.

"Don't touch that!"

Emma lowered her hand but continued to examine his helmet. Clearing his throat, Emmett turned his attention back to the kid in the life preserver, rejuvenating his gusto with a deep breath. He flipped a switch, twisted a knob, and planted his foot in front of Marty, straightening the headgear.

"I am going to read your thoughts."

Marty glanced at Emma, expecting to see her tucked into a silent shell of shock off to the side of Doc, revering in the fact that she was seeing her father, in some strange way, back from the dead. Instead of getting caught up in a mind-boggling stupor over that, however, it appeared that his Chem lab partner was occupied with a different upsetting conundrum, continuing to scrutinize the heavy metal unit on Doc's head with a look of disgust.

"You've come from a great dist-"

"Whyare you squeezing it into your head like that?"

Emmett cast her an annoyed frown, readjusting. "To concentrate and stabilize the neuropaths of the brain waves! Now, quiet! I need absolute silence!"

She raised her eyebrows. "That –"

"_Shhhh!_"

Emma bit her tongue, eyes darkening as they smoothly met Marty's. He beseeched her for help, for a silent acknowledgement that yes, of course now was not the time to analyze his brain waves via primitive suction cup in their current predicament. Marty could barely hold onto a single thought himself for the past day, so _good luck on that one_, he thought at the erratic scientist.

Doc readied himself again, but he felt the girl's hard stare on him and slowly looked over at her, eyeballing her impatiently. She raised her eyebrows again, and he groaned.

"Just say your piece so I can get on with this without any more interruption!"

Emma leapt at the opportunity. "Pushing that thing into your skull is going to short out your nervous system with that many amperes crowding the parietal condenser."

She reached up, plucking a black wire out of place on the helmet and sending Emmett reeling off to the side incredulously.

"What in God's name do you think you're doing?!" he shouted, pressing the helmet to his head with great protectiveness.

"Of course, I don't even know why you have a _parietal _condenser when the theta and delta waves are most prominently coded in the temporal lobe."

"I'm not trying to read theta and delta waves; I'm trying to read his beta waves," Doc said, smacking the back of one hand into the palm of the other. "His active, in-the-present, _now_ thoughts!"

"I can read his thoughts just by the look on his face!"

Emmett narrowed his eyes on her. "Do you know what this is?" he hissed, pointing at the machine. "It's an electroencephalograph."

"I know what an EEG is."

"State-of-the-art electrical brain wave mapping system."

"With a very high _temporal resolution_ –"

"And I am about to have a breakthrough in neurolinguistics by translating _those_ impulses –!"

"Hey!"

Emma and Doc looked over at Marty. He had no idea what had just been said, but it was time to bring their conversation back from the far reaches of space. Thirty years apart and they could still argue fluidly in the foreign language of science. Though Emma probably had the upper hand now.

He pulled the suction cup from his forehead, settling his wide eyes on Emma. She relaxed her defensive stance, suddenly feeling a painful rush of lightheadedness from the heated exchange. She nodded to Marty rather weakly, sitting in the now-empty riveted armchair. Marty took a deep breath as she sat, meeting Doc's eye anxiously.

"Doc, we're from the future. We came here in a time machine that you invented. Now, we need your help to get back to the year 1985."

Doc looked between the two of them, anger touching his skeptical tone.

"Time machine? I haven't invented any time machine."

Emma looked around the side of the chair, back at Doc. "You will. Everything I just said about condensers and delta waves and coding? I learned it all from you."

After another moment, Emmett chuckled and motioned to Emma. "Impressive, my dear, but not convincing."

He promptly removed the small cage from the top of his head, striding past Emma's indignant scowl to the octagonal table in the rear of the foyer. Marty hurried to join him, pleading as the irritated scientist picked up a set of calipers.

"Come on, Doc! You've gotta help us! You're the only one who knows how your time machine works!"

"Honestly," Emmett chided, "tell whoever sent you here that they have sufficiently ridiculed the crackpot for one evening, won't you? I have work to do."

Emma's tired chuckle pricked his ears. "_You_ sent us here."

Doc pointed the calipers at her warningly, but Marty then took out the contents of his wallet, desperately trying to convince Doc of the validity of their plight. A bout of vertigo took Emma as she watched her not-yet-father frown at the items skeptically, and she rested her head against the side of the armchair and shut her eyes.

She held her breath as the pain made her stomach churn, trying not to let a groan or hiss pass her lips. But in doing so, her lightheadedness increased, and the distressed assertions of Marty and haughty mockery of her father floated higher and higher up until she was straining to hear them. Her head throbbed once, like a shockwave rippling over her brain, and her father's voice was suddenly breaking over her and Marty angrily as he snatched up several rolls of blueprints.

"Who's _vice_ president? _Jerry Lewis_?"

A fresh breath of autumn air touched Emma's face, and she inhaled its pleasant chill as the voices around her began to fall away again. Emma squinted over at the table, ready to just chuck something at this thickheaded imbecile of a scientist her future father was being when she saw that he and Marty had vanished.

Emma sat up in the chair, eyes darting over to the opened back door. Their shouts reverberated outside, and she was half-afraid her father's patience had run its course and that Marty stood a good chance of getting zapped with something. With one more inhale of the refreshing breeze, Emma forced herself out of the chair and out the door, cradling her left elbow.

Marty had chased Doc down the manicured lawn to the garage. She hurried to catch up as Doc locked himself inside, her body quite opposed to the jostle of the light jog towards Marty's frantic run-on sentence.

"You were standing on your toilet, and you were hanging a clock, and you fell, and you hit your head on the sink! And that's when you came up with the idea for the flux capacitor," he said, slowly turning to look back as Emma approached, "which is… what… makes time travel possible."

Emma panted, she and Marty briefly stewing in the fear of defeat before Doc threw the door open again, stricken and wide-eyed. He glanced over at the girl – this girl that had spouted all this brainwave stuff at him without hesitation – and his eyebrows deepened in confusion.

She had paled within seconds, beads of perspiration dotted along her hairline. Then, her vacant eyes rolled back into her head, and she crumpled to the brick driveway.

"Emma!" Marty fell to her side, horrified that he hadn't caught her. "Shit!"

Emmett blinked as if he had missed something. "What's wrong with her?"

"She has a bullet in her shoulder."

"A bullet?" He huffed. "How did I get mixed up in this kind of riffraff?"

"No, Doc, it was an accident, ju- Doc, please." Marty looked up at him, a whole different plea in his eyes now. "You have _got_ to help us. You're our only hope. Please."

The hardened disposition Emmett had fronted from so many practical jokes waned with the flux capacitor story, and it did so further at the helplessness in this young man's voice.

And he wasn't about to let some girl die in his front yard.

Attitude shifting across his face, Emmett quickly knelt, helping Marty gather her up. "Why didn't you seek medical attention?"

"She refused to go to the hospital," Marty said, standing with Emma in his arms. "We just wanted to find you and get home."

Emmett pressed his lips together, watching the dead weight of the girl's head loll into Marty's orange vest. "She may not have to go. After we remove the bullet, I'll make a call."

"You sure you can get it out?"

"Let's get her inside."

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	7. Stroke of Luck

**CHAPTER SIX  
**_**Stroke of Luck**_

Saturday, November 5, 1955  
10:35 PM

Marty wasn't certain of Doc's level of medicinal expertise; he had married a nurse, yes, but not yet, and even then Marty couldn't accurately gauge the degree of knowledge Doc would have obtained from her. Doc was a surprising individual in many ways, but Marty doubted very much that he knew how to remove bullets from shoulders. At this point in time, however, it was what they had to work with.

Marty repositioned Emma in his arms and followed Doc up the driveway. He felt the wet warmth of blood seeping through the denim jacket to his shirt sleeve as he maneuvered sideways through the front door, all the while beating himself up for not making her go to the hospital that morning.

"Lie her on her stomach when we get upstairs," Doc said through the foyer. "I'll need you to cut away the fabric so I can access the wound."

"Right."

At the top of the stairs, Emmett entered the door to the right, urgently ushering Marty inside. He helped him lie Emma amidst the lavish crimson and brown pillows and elegantly embroidered comforter on the four-post bed, tossing some of the satin pillows to the floor. Marty went to the far side of the bed, nearest her injury, and turned on a bright lamp.

"That's good, that's good," Doc said, retrieving a pair of scissors from the bureau drawer and handing them to Marty. "Here. And keep this blanket handy in case she goes into shock. She may still lose more blood before I get the bullet out. I'll get some towels and alcohol."

Marty nodded as Doc went into the bathroom, his mind now scattered to the point that he looked at the scissors as if he had no idea what to do with them. After a moment of self-recollection, he sat them down to take his jacket off Emma, slightly nauseated at how large the stain beneath it had become. The sock and sleeve were completely saturated, and he cut them away first, dropping them on top of his jacket on the floor.

Holding his breath, Marty pinched the collar of her shirt and started cutting. The overpowering smell made him stop when Emmett returned. The scientist's eyes grew at the sight, but in seeing Marty's state, he did his best to keep the boy grounded.

"It's alright," he said, setting towels on the bed and a tray on the nightstand. "It's not as bad as it looks. Just cut."

Marty did so, cutting the length of her spine. When he finished, he handed the scissors to Doc.

"Easy does it," Doc said. "Don't pull too hard."

Marty cringed as he peeled the matted material from her sticky skin. Another strong, metallic waft hit them, and Marty coughed. When he had the sopping fabric off her back, Doc immediately pressed a cloth to the injury and inserted a needle next to it.

"What is that?" Marty asked.

Doc removed the syringe and rag. "Procaine. Numbing agent. Hold this pan."

Marty took the tiny, white metal bowl, watching on bated breath as Doc leaned over the crater in Emma's shoulder with a cloth damp with alcohol and a pair of surgical scissors. He swallowed uncomfortably as the thin, curved tip entered the bullet hole. More blood began to leak out.

"Is it supposed to be doing that?"

"Everything's fine," Doc assured, squinting down into the wound.

Suddenly, in seeing Doc calmly search for the fragment in Emma's shoulder, it dawned on Marty that this man was saving his daughter's life and didn't even know it. What was more; Emma had been injured as a result of something Doc didn't even know he had done yet. It was like some strange full-circle redemption or karma. He couldn't imagine how Doc would react to all this in 1985.

And then he realized… Doc _wouldn't_ have a reaction to any of this in 1985.

A small weight dropped into pan with a dense _ping_. Marty looked down at the blunt bullet fragment, little red dots on the white bowl from where it had danced around. He looked over at her shoulder as Doc wiped it clean with a wet washcloth.

"Where is this time machine I invented?"

"Uh, out by the Lyon Estates development," Marty said, patting the skin dry. "We came in at Peabody's farm before it stalled out."

"Stalled out? It's a car?"

"Yeah. What'd you think it was? A refrigerator?"

Emmett shook his head thoughtfully as he swabbed the area with iodine and layered it with gauze; whatever the shape this time-travelling vessel was, he still wouldn't believe it until he saw it.

Marty helped him secure the bandages with copious amounts of thick tape and replace everything to the tray on the nightstand. Doc then collected the bloodied rags and clothes, throwing them in a cold bath.

Marty examined Emma's face, half-hoping she would open her eyes so he knew she was really going to be okay. Her bare back rose and fell gently, however, and it was enough to pacify him for the time being.

Now he understood why she had given him third-degree earlier.

He picked up the spare blanket and threw it open above her. It billowed and fell in waves over her body, creating small hills and valleys between her and the pillows. He pulled the edge up over her shoulders, minding the bandages. Once the numbing stuff wore off, he couldn't imagine the kind of pain she'd be in.

"Well," Doc said, emerging from the bathroom, "let's go get it."

Marty pocketed one hand and motioned to his unconscious friend with the other. "What about Emma?"

"She'll be out for an hour or two, likely until the pain returns. We'll let her rest until we get back."

Marty reluctantly shut off the bedside lamp and allowed Doc to lead him away from the bed. At the door, they looked back. When Emma remained dormant, they slipped out of the doorway, allowing the door to shut quietly in their wake.

* * *

Emma felt herself choking back a few sobs when she muddled back into existence. Hot, throbbing pain pulsated into her back and arm, and a twinge shot up her neck from lying face down. The room was dark, save for the few threads of the lawn's lights peaking in from behind the heavy curtains. A clock ticked on somewhere behind her, and aside from that, silence pressed around her uncomfortably. Alone in this dark, unfamiliar place, it suddenly became a necessity to find Marty.

And that required sitting up.

Emma let some of the withheld sobs slip as she brought her right arm up from her side. The uninhibited limb slowly tucked itself under her ribs, the slight tensing of muscles on one side sending shards of pain into the other. A loud gasp escaped her, and she immediately let her muscles collapse. Lip quivering, she turned her face into the mattress and bit down on the blanket, muffling her cries.

Her pain had reached new heights, beyond that of initially assessing it at the DeLorean and waking up in Lorraine's bed. The adrenaline was wearing off, and the length of the day and intensity of its events were settling heavily on Emma's morale. Things were beginning to seem impossible, even that time not long ago when she firmly believed anything was possible.

_Getting out of a bed is not going to stop you._

_I can do this. I have to do this. No, I can't. Lord. Find Marty. Find Dad. Get home. _

_Get home, get home, get up and get home._

_Get up._

_Get up, get up._

Finally, summoning all of the physical strength she could against the pain, Emma gritted her teeth and shakily pushed her body upright. As her legs slid down the silky comforter to the floor, she mentally composed herself and caught her breath.

A smooth blanket fell from her bare back. The sensation widened her eyes, and she reached for the light, horrified to see the front half of her shirt still lying on the bed. Looking down at herself, Emma immediately clutched the velveteen throw to her chest. Her mind reeled for an explanation when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a large swath of white tape on top of her left shoulder.

Slowly looking back at the nightstand, Emma picked up the small white bowl on the medicine tray, her fingers curling around its lip when she saw the bullet in it.

It was no wonder her shoulder hurt as much as it did if they'd gone digging around in it for that thing.

Despite it all, her spirits lifted her cheeks with a smile.

_Thanks, Dad._

* * *

Now clad in an oversized yellow button-down, Emma meandered into the sitting room in search of Marty when familiar shouting again came from the yard.

Doc whirled through the back door in hysterical upset. She stepped back as he hurtled toward her, watching as he tore a framed picture of Thomas Edison from the mantle, sat it on the end stand, and fell into the chair. He groaned into his hands with no acknowledgement of her presence whatsoever.

"One point twenty-one gigawatts," he kept muttering in various pitches. "One point twenty-one gigawatts! How could I have been so careless! One point twenty-one gigawatts?"

When he started addressing the photo, Emma sat on the edge of the couch, staring at him.

Not for the first time that evening, she found herself startled to think that_ this guy _was her future father when Marty suddenly ran in.

"Doc, all we need is little plutonium."

Emmett huffed anxiously. "I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drug store, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by!"

He took the kid by the shoulders, giving him a shake to make sure the message reached him full and well: "Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here."

The room fell silent.

In truth, Emma supposed she'd been waiting to hear it all day; that kind of power was intimidating in 1985, but 1955, it was just plain monstrous, even to a scientist of her father's caliber. Hearing it didn't make it any easier to digest, however, and a new sense of illness came over her. She felt Marty sink into the couch next to her, incapacitated by the birth of such a reality.

Seeing this, Emmett sighed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Hey, 1955 isn't all that bad," he said quietly. "You should be happy you ended up in a year when you knew someone."

His attempt at sympathy and optimism seemed to fall on deaf ears, and _it's no wonder_, he scolded himself. They came to him for help, and he blew up their hopes without as much as a shred of tact.

Emmett wet his lips, talking to his hands.

"Perhaps you two can stay with me until you get on your feet. Then-"

"No, Doc, come on!" Marty leapt up, shaking himself out of his stupor. "I'm not going to _settle down_ in 1955! I've got a life back in 1985! I've got a date!"

Emma sat taller at this, watching Marty tear the blue clock tower flyer from his back pocket and unfold it in a hurry, shoving Jennifer Parker's phone number under Doc's nose. Emma's skin prickled all the way up to her scalp as if acid were seeping into every one of her pores.

"Can't you just find a nice girl here?"

Emma glanced at Marty guiltily, eyes widening when he turned his head back towards her ever so slightly. When Marty didn't reply, Doc looked over at her.

"Do you have a young man back in 1985?"

Emma blinked, not sure what she had. Father gone, Marty and Jennifer...Now that she thought about it, even though she was thirty years away from home, she wasn't sure she wanted to return to what awaited her in 1985. She was pretty sure the only thing left for her would be Einstein.

"I have a dog," she ventured sheepishly.

"It's not about the girl, Doc," Marty interceded. "It's about the rest of my life, and Emma's, too." He sat on the coffee table directly in front of him, meeting his eye resolutely. "You've never let us down before. You always tell me that if I put my mind to it, I can do anything, and I know you can figure this out."

Doc shook his head, and Marty began pacing.

"It's going to take more than confidence to generate that kind of power, Marty. One point twenty-one gigawatts? The only power source capable of that is a bolt of lightning! Unfortunately, you never know when or where it's gonna strike!"

Emma's mind jumpstarted at the words, and, judging by Marty's face, they hadn't escaped him, either. She eyed the blue flyer with newfound hope as Marty extended it to Doc. Excitement kindled in her eyes as he read the flyer, and when the same flame maniacally ignited in his, the first thing she intended to do when she got back to 1985 was thank Jennifer Parker profusely for asking Marty out.

"It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 PM next Saturday night!"

She smiled as he began to fret about in the building frenzy of brainstorming, searching for and pulling words from the limitless space around him and formulating an idea.

"If we could somehow harness this lightning…_channel it _into the flux capacitor…it just might work. Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!"

Marty jumped up. _I'll take it._

"Alright! Saturday's good! We can spend a week in 1955! We'll hang out, you can show us around –"

Doc suddenly gripped Marty's shoulders. "Marty, that is completely out of the question. You must not leave this _house_. You must not see anybody or talk to anybody. Anything you do could have serious repercussions on future events! Do you understand?"

Emma stared at Marty, slowly standing as he half-heartedly complied with Doc's wishes. The scientist narrowed his eyes at Marty's aloof reply, and looking back at Emma's rigid approach, his fears were all but confirmed. He pointed at Marty, a knowing smile sending Marty's gaze to the floor.

"Marty, have you interacted with anybody else today besides me?"

Marty stepped out of Doc's grasp and made the confession. "Yeah, well, I might have, sorta…bumped into my parents."

"Great Scott!" Doc spat. "Let me see that photograph of your brother!"

Marty withdrew the picture from his pocket, and the three of them crowded around it at the ivory floor lamp.

"This proves my theory," Doc said, pressing his thumb to the photo. "Look at your brother!"

Emma's face hardened at what she saw. After the day she'd had, she'd imagine this was just one more thing she was going to have to accept as really and truly happening – Marty's brother's head was gone, and Marty said as much.

"It's like it's erased."

"Erased from existence," Doc murmured cryptically.

Emma felt her stomach plummet as she stared at the photograph. If "bumping into" your parents led to an erased existence, how had she not gone up in a puff of smoke for having intentionally sought out her father?

Doc now stabbed at the picture with his finger. "Where is she?"

"Linda?"

"No, her," Doc said, pointing to Emma. "She is your sister, isn't she?"

Emma glanced at Marty before raising her eyebrows at the floor. "That seems to be what we're telling everyone."

"We told my dad that when we ran into him, and we've just stuck to it since," Marty explained. "But she's not really my sister. Just a friend."

"Then you should be fine," he said to Emma, "unless you've also –"

Emma shook her head. "No, I've…I'm good. All's well."

Doc handed Marty his picture. "Still, I wish we had your photo just to be safe."

Marty paused as he opened his wallet. "Actually…"

Emma and Doc watched as he slowly exchanged one photo for another – Emma's senior picture.

She looked at him curiously, and he shrugged with a hint of a smile as Doc took the tiny headshot from him. She said nothing, just smiled when he took a deep breath and looked away.

"Everything seems to be in order," Doc announced, returning the other photo. "Marty, you are going to get to see plenty of 1955 _just_ like you wanted."

He didn't like the tone of Doc's voice. "Yeah?"

"You are introducing your parents to each other first thing Monday morning in school unless you want to disappear from that photograph with your brother and sister," he said sternly. "Now, we'll see to the details tomorrow, but you need to understand the jeopardy you're in right now. We have less than a week to work with."

Marty nodded uneasily. "I got it, Doc."

"As for you," Emmett said, taking Emma by her good arm, "you'll need a lot of rest to recover. I'll fix up a guest room for you tomorrow, and in the meantime, you can sleep in my room."

That sounded like a _terrible _idea.

Emma shook her head quickly as Marty accepted the couch for the evening. The more time she spent around her father, the better the likelihood something would slip and tip him off about her true identity. Even if he was in the lab all day and she locked herself in a room, she could hear her dad's voice of reason opposing the situation if he were faced with it. And she wasn't ready to explain something to this guy that she was barely wrapping her own head around. She needed as long of a leash as she could get.

"I can't just stay here," she blurted out. "Marty's parents saw me and know me now."

"All the more reason not to interfere further," Emmett said.

"It's too late for that! But now I can help things along."

"And we could use all the help we can get," Marty added.

There was no way Emma was sitting this week out while he gallivanted around by himself. Knowing his luck, he'd further endanger his existence without someone with him in the field. If one could endanger their existence beyond erasing it, that is.

Emmett began to guide Emma towards the staircase. "I'm going to have an acquaintance of mine come look at your shoulder tonight before we make any decisions. If all goes accordingly, I'll consider it."

"You'll _allow_ it."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

**. Please Review .**


	8. Quality Time

**CHAPTER SEVEN  
**_**Quality Time**_

Sunday, November 6, 1955  
2:33 AM

An hour after he saw Emma to his room, Emmett pushed the bedroom door open again, frowning as he allowed an austere, raven-haired woman inside. She strode passed the hot fireplace and across the room, her low heels sinking into the carpeting when she stopped at the bedside table. Sitting her medical bag on the stand, she glanced at the unconscious girl and unbuttoned her coat.

"What have you done so far?" she asked, handing Emmett her coat.

Already making great efforts to maintain his patience, he bit the inside of his lip as he laid the coat at the foot of the bed.

"I removed the bullet; cleaned, sterilized, and bandaged the wound."

She made a face at his boorish dressing, peeling the iodine-soaked gauze from Emma's shoulder. She leaned in for a closer look when Emmett approached, wordlessly extending a bowl for her to deposit the soiled bandages in. The nurse wiped her hands on a white towel before gently dabbing the excess iodine from around the inflamed crater. She touched the hot skin with the back of her hand.

"It's infected."

"How bad?"

She pulled a syringe from her bag, raising her eyebrows as she filled it. "Bad enough that you should have taken her to a hospital and saved me the pleasure of your company this evening."

Emmett demanded deep breaths of himself, glaring at the back of her head as she stuck Emma's shoulder.

"Believe me, my dear," he clipped with a sardonic grin, "I never intended on seeing you again after I set foot out of that university either, but the matter at hand is quite beyond the both of us."

His guest maintained her steely silence as she put the syringe on the table and removed a few more provisions from the black bag.

"I need to do stitches. Is she sedated?"

"Yes."

"With what?"

"Chloroform."

"Richardson or Linhart mixture?"

"…No mixture. Just chloroform."

She looked back at him sharply. "Jesus, Emmett. How much did you give her?"

"A few tablespoons on a rag."

The woman shook her head and readied Emma's shoulder for the stitches. Emma was motionless through her handiwork, right up to the clean, compact gauze square taped over it all. At length, she held up a glass vial of clear liquid, puncturing it with a clean needle. Emmett stepped forward, watching as she drew back the plunger and eased Emma onto her back.

"This is morphine," she sighed irritably, administering it to Emma's arm. "She gets it only at night. I'll give her narcotics to take during the day and a salve for the infection."

She sat the needle next to the vial on the stand, procuring another vial, a bottle of pills, and a wide, stout tin from her bag before snapping it shut. She turned to Emmett who waited begrudgingly at the foot of the bed with her open coat, half of his face obscured by the angle of the firelight.

"The stitches will come undone if she lifts anything heavy," she said as he helped her slip into the thin, charcoal wool. "Change the bandage every night."

"Anything else?"

She held out her hand. He rolled her eyes, extending the promised check. When she had one end, he tugged his end back with a curt smile.

"About her condition."

"Yes – get rid of her as soon as you can. Because if she gets worse, I won't be back."

He let go of the check. "Of course not."

From the bed, Emma shifted in her sleep. Emmett and the nurse froze, clutching to each other's forearms to still the other as her chest rose with a few quick, uneven breaths. Her eyes fluttered open and then closed, a great sigh eventually emerging from her. As she fell away into unconsciousness again, Emmett and his guest let eyes meet; hers cautious, his hard. His voice tightened to a hiss.

"I trust she will recover so much as I will not need to contact you again?"

She smirked, meeting his tone. "As I said: get rid of her. I won't – be – back."

Whatever words he had to say to her died as she dug her nails through his clothing and immediately left, her heels stamping hard rectangles not-so-softly down the stairs.

As the sound faded with the sharp shut of the front door, Emmett looked up at the young girl lying in his bed. Her face now relaxed, her pain now temporarily assuaged, he left, his thumb working the discomfort out of his forearm the nurse had given him as a parting gift.

* * *

Emma's shoulder greeted her with a mild pulsating ache when she woke up, her pain somewhat numbed from what it had been the night before. She gazed at the sunlight streaking across the contours of thick canopy above her and wondered briefly how her father had gone from sleeping like a king to that little box spring in the corner of the garage.

The image of him and a woman talking near the foot of the bed briefly flashed across her mind as she sat up. She tried to jar more from her memory, but the silver snakeskin robe he had been wearing the night before caught her eye, discarded over the back of a sitting chair next to the fireplace. After managing to get back into her irrevocably destroyed once-white pants and the pale yellow button-down, she put the robe on, her hands swimming through the sleeves to their ends. God, it smelled just like him.

Tying it around her waist, Emma wandered downstairs. The foyer and sitting room were quiet, but before she decided to go down to the garage, she heard loud crashes from the kitchen.

"Damn it!"

Emma hurried to the kitchen, somewhat surprised not to see a fire. Emmett was bent over an avalanche of pots and pans and was hastily shoving them all back into the cupboard. He retrieved a frying pan in the process, wielding it over his head as if daring the unstable mountain of cookware to even think about moving. He shut the cabinet door and sighed, dropping the skillet on the stovetop with a clatter.

She never knew her father to be the cooking type. Sure, he could make a handful of decent dishes, some of which were exceptional, but they had always been too busy with projects and experiments to devote significant time to their culinary skills. Sit-down dinners usually meant leaning over schematics at the work bench with bologna sandwiches or eating TV dinners on the couch together. Seeing him so out of his element made her wonder if the mansion hadn't really burned down due to his lack of experience in the kitchen.

"Need some help?" she asked, his head jerking up. "I can do something, if you want."

"I know how to boil an egg," he said, issuing towards the dining room. "You're injured. You just sit."

Emma paused in the doorway of the dining room as Doc returned to the stove. A solid mahogany table and six cushioned chairs were in the center of the room, an intricate golden chandelier overhead. The table had an ivory runner scattered with shriveled flower petals on it from the wilting centerpiece, and at the far end of the table, it was bunched up by a heap of wires and metal coils, a soldering iron, and an open tool box.

"Is Marty awake yet?" she asked, slowly sitting down at the head of the table.

"No. I'm going to wake him up in about ten minutes, though," he said, scraping the hash browns from the bottom of the pan and giving them a shake. "We have a lot to do today! How are you feeling this morning?"

"A little better." She looked up at him as he came in and put a glass of milk in front of her. "That woman that came last night-?"

"She's a nurse. It took a while, but I convinced her to come have a look at you."

Emma stared at her glass of milk, eyes growing. "How do you know her?"

"Oh," Emmett said, preparing her plate, "She patched me up after one of my experiments backfired at the university."

Emma didn't move as he sat the plate in front of her, analyzing the agitation in his voice.

"You two don't get along."

Emmett huffed, deepening his eyebrows as he left again. "No, I'm afraid we don't."

Emma nearly laughed. According to the stories her father had told her, he was injured in an explosion while working in the physics lab at the university in the early fifties. Her mother, being the newest nurse in the infirmary, was given the unfortunate task of dealing with the crackpot no one else would touch with a 10-foot stick. She was fiercely condescending towards him during his three years on staff, but when their paths crossed again in 1961, their snarky banter was accompanied by a pair of smiles, and they eventually married. Five years after painting the nursery the first time, they finally had a baby girl – a baby girl he was heartbroken to raise alone.

_Six more years_, she thought. Six more years until they were even _nice_ to each other.

Emma blinked as Marty sat down to her right, took the toast off the edge of her plate, and bit into it. At length, she glanced over at him rigidly. He sucked the buttery crumbs from the corner of his mouth, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes at her.

"You okay?"

"My mother was here last night," she whispered.

Marty pulled his head back, face scrunched. "What?"

"Check my photo," she hissed.

Marty glanced over at Doc in the kitchen before discreetly slipping the wallet from his back pocket. Emma eyed him as he opened it under the table and checked the picture. To her relief, he winked before putting it back into his blue jeans.

She nodded in satisfaction, silently picking up her fork as Emmett entered the dining room. The scientist handed Marty a plate before sitting down to his own breakfast. Marty peeled the shell from his egg.

"Doc, I hear you had a girl over last night."

"If you're referring to that she-devil," Emmett said with a mouthful of food, "she was here treating her shoulder in exchange for a check and never being contacted again. Of course, I believe I'm benefiting more from that bargain." He stabbed at his hash browns.

Marty glanced sideways at Emma uneasily. She had told him about her parents' first encounters, but he hadn't expected such intense animosity. She raised her eyebrows at his troubled expression. _I told you they hated each other_.

"So, uh, what's the verdict on Emma?"

"Emma is clear to accompany you in your endeavor, given she doesn't lift anything heavy. The pain medication and salve should keep her on her feet."

Marty smiled over at her. "Great! So what's on the agenda first?"

"Today I'm going set up the guest rooms, and I have to get you clothes and some groceries. Make a list of anything you want from the grocer's, and write down your sizes, too."

The cringe-inducing Christmas Dress of 1976 flashed across Emma's mind. "I'm picking out my own clothes," she said quickly. "I promise not to talk to anyone and endanger my existence like Marty." "Yeah, yeah," Marty said, "Come on, Doc. We can help carry everything."

"No," Doc said, wiping away his milk moustache. "I'm going without you. Especially you," he said to Emma. "If you pass out again, that's going to attract a lot of unwanted attention. You also need to see how you react to your medication, and you're not going out dressed like that."

She made a defiant face. "I'm coming."

"You better just let her go," Marty said. "She's as stubborn as her dad – she'll find a way to get what she wants."

"No."

"Fine then," Emma snipped, sitting back in her chair. "Have fun buying women's underwear."

Doc and Marty exchanged looks. She smiled.

"I want–"

"Just," – Emmett shut his eyes, waving his fork to cut her off – "I'll find you something to wear."

* * *

It was something, alright. The dress belonged to her grandmother, and its musty odor and thick wool skirt made her skin crawl. She had to be mindful of keeping her shoulder covered when picking out her week's wardrobe, which wasn't exactly a challenge. As soon as she had a more suitable, comfortable dress in her hands, she was in the dressing room changing into it. She and Marty came out of the stalls at the same time, smirking at one another.

"Well, if it isn't little Richie Cunningham."

"Cool it, Aunt Bea."

"I do _not_ look like Aunt Bea."

"Yes, you do."

And instead of sticking with Doc and the shopping cart in the grocery store, they each got a basket and made their own rounds. Emma's eyes lit up when she found the Peter Pan, and she began filling her basket to the point that it would be uncomfortably heavy to carry, even for her good arm.

"Biff? Biff! Are you getting creamy or chunky?"

"Chunky, Grandma!"

Emma jumped, staring at the brawny teenage Biff Tannen who had just materialized beside her. He shook his grandmother's annoying voice from his head, scanning the shelves until he felt Emma's eyes on him. She looked away as he glared at her.

"What do you think you're doing?"

She looked up at him. "Excuse me?"

Biff's eyes widened, and he smirked, recognizing her. "Ah, sweet cheeks, huh? You think you can just take all the chunky Peter Pan? Like nobody else wants any?"

She held up the only green-capped jar in her basket. "There's one left."

"I know." He swiped it from her, tossing it in his hand. "Thanks."

"Hey! Give me my peanut butter back."

Biff shrugged, sniggering. "I don't see your name on it."

Scowling, Emma reached up and flicked him in the eye.

"Ow!"

Instinctively clutching his eye, the jar of peanut butter fell out of his hand, and she caught it before it hit the ground.

"Now you don't see anything," she said pleasantly, replacing the jar in her basket. Her face darkened. "Don't touch my peanut butter ever again. Got it, butthead?"

"Who you callin' 'butthead,' butthead?"

Emma reached up to flick his other eye, smiling when he jumped back and shielded his face. She lowered her hand, and he frowned angrily. She took a jar of creamy Peter Pan from the shelf. He grunted when she shoved it into his abdomen.

"I'm glad we had this talk." She patted his cheek a little harder than necessary, making him flinch. "See you later, Biff."

And with that, Emma left Biff Tannen fuming at a wall of creamy peanut butter with a bloodshot eye. His grandmother rounded the corner then, her girth trudging along behind the shopping cart.

"Biff! What are you doing, Biff?"

He pitched the glass jar into the cart, busting the carton of eggs.

"Where are my CoCo Wheats?" he growled.

"I got you oatmeal instead. You need more fiber, Biff."

"I don't want fiber! I said I wanted _goddamn CoCo Wheats_!"

One aisle over, Emma smiled up at the top shelf where serendipity shined down on the last box of Coco Wheats. There was no way she was going to leave it there.

Plucking it up, she dropped it in her basket, happily making her way to the checkout.

* * *

Once their escapades in town were over, Emma relayed her encounter with Biff to Marty over dinner while Doc freshened up a pair of rooms upstairs in the eastern hallway. Their doors were directly across the hall from one another, separated by a tall window and an ornate grandfather clock. Emmett showed Marty to his childhood bedroom on the right and Emma to a flowery guest room on the left.

An hour or so later, a soft knock came on the guest room doorframe. Emma finished reading the last few words of a paragraph and looked up from the bed, half-startled not to see Marty, but her not-yet-father smiling at her. The past twenty-four hours in his presence had been surprisingly easy on her, but now, without Marty there as a buffer, she regarded the man in her doorway with wide, innocent eyes. Her chest swelled, causing her wound to throb. She grimaced lightly and shifted into the pillow behind her back, silently talking herself back down. Doc leaned his head inside.

"Can I get you something for the pain?"

After all she had been through and thinking about the long week that awaited her, Emma decided not to be hero. She nodded, and Doc disappeared momentarily. Emma sat up when he returned with a small vile and needle, sitting on the edge of her bed. She reluctantly pushed her long, white sleeve up, turning the inside of her elbow outwards as she made a fist. She hoped he was paying attention the night before when her not-yet-mother had shown him how to do it.

Doc swabbed her skin, watching her out of the corner of his eye. "Are you squeamish?"

"A little. Just be quick."

Doc put his hand underneath her elbow to steady it. Despite a mild dislike for needles, Emma looked on as it entered her vein, exhaling to assuage the sting of the pinch. Doc slowly pushed the plunger, and he began to see relief ease into her face after a few moments.

"Is the room comfortable?"

"Yes, thank you." She issued to the book in her lap. "Just doing a bit of reading before bed."

Doc pressed a cotton ball to her arm as he removed the needle, setting it on the nightstand. Glancing over, he raised his eyebrows, intrigued by her reading selection.

"Well," he smiled, "John von Neumann. I didn't take you for the quantum mechanics type."

Emma found herself chuckling. Of all the sciences he had introduced to her, quantum physics and mechanics were her least favorite. The 1985 version of her father would have said those words in jest and laughed with her, but this man's observation was genuine and conversational. Emma bit back her laughter, choosing to blame it on the morphine.

"I'm not. But my father," – she swallowed, suddenly sobering as she spoke – "My father owned a copy. He was a scientist."

She looked back down at the pristine pages, smoothing her hand over a large equation. Years later, this book would still be floating around the lab with an abundance of dog-eared pages and chicken scratch in the margins, its corners dulled and worn from countless referencing on his part and a few of her aggravating school projects. Thumbing through the clean pages, she realized just how much it would, in essence, become him.

The remnants of her smile finally faltered, a breath rushing out of her. "I guess I just really miss him."

"You'll see him again soon. What kind of science does he study?"

She held her breath, staring at the lines of equations until they skewed.

"It doesn't matter. He died recently."

Doc's eyes grew, drifting to the book in the silence.

"I am so sorry, my dear," he said quietly as her eyes began to shine. "You must miss him terribly."

Emma nodded, unable to speak with her throat so thick with emotion. A stab of grief made her clamp down on the inside of her lip and led her reddening eyes to his. She searched for his ghost, a strange sense of calm overcoming her at the way his expression made her feel like a little girl. She shut her eyes; what she wouldn't give for the comfort of him holding her close again, promising everything would be okay.

Doc gently took her hand from the book, and her eyes fluttered open.

"I know how dismal it must seem right now, but things will get better," he told her. "When my father died, someone told my mother that only time would ease her heartache. Time heals," he mused with a sigh. He gave her a small smile. "Those are wise words."

The sorrow in her eyes subsided, and Emma regarded him with silent, gracious respect. A familiar part of her father had just emerged, and his words were unexpectedly, effectively reassuring.

He gave her hand a light squeeze, stood, and paused in the doorway.

"If you need anything, please tell me so."

Emma nodded. "Thank you."

"Goodnight."

"Night."

As Doc closed the door, Emma looked back down at the page. She pulled the sleeve of her pajamas over the heel of her hand and removed the threatening tears from her eyes.

**. Please Review .**


	9. A Day In The Life

**Thanks for all your wonderful feedback, you guys! This story is made purely out of love and respect for these movies, so you're going to get nothing but my best. If you haven't read it yet, there is a two-part prequel to all this called Red Letter Date you should definitely check out! I love hearing from you and value your readership beyond what I can possibly say. Thanks for taking the time to read! I hope you continue to enjoy it as much as I enjoy writing it!**

* * *

**CHAPTER EIGHT  
**_**A Day in the Life**_

Sunday, November 6, 1955  
9:32 PM

Marty came around the corner from the staircase, ready to head to bed and call it a night. He slowed, however, when he saw Doc standing before the grandfather clock at the end of the hall with his back to him. Having seen him lost in reveries a few times, he knew to approach carefully as not to startle him.

"What's going on, Doc? Everything okay?"

Doc watched the golden pendulum swing, his voice quite somber. "She's grieving for her father. Apparently, he passed recently. Though," – he turned to Marty – "I'd imagine you knew that."

Marty made himself nod. "Yeah. Yeah, it's really…been difficult."

"I hope I didn't do anything to-"

"No," Marty said quickly. "You didn't. She's just…"

He looked over his shoulder at Emma's bedroom door, light still lining the bottom edge of it. Doc turned from the clock and stood behind Marty, glancing between his strained face and the door.

"Maybe you should talk to her," he suggested quietly. "Did you know her father at all?"

Marty swallowed. "Yeah. Pretty well."

"Then perhaps a reassuring word will help her rest easier."

"Didn't you just drug her?"

"She's got six minutes til the stuff really hits her."

"Alright."

Doc clapped him on both his shoulders, giving them a squeeze as the boy sighed. "I'll be in my lab."

"Right, Doc."

As Emmett walked away, Marty watched him round the corner and pinched his eyebrows together. He replayed the conversation in his mind several times. To Doc, this hesitant, withdrawn Emma was not all he had known her to be; Marty was still surprised by how well she seemed to be getting on, considering. But it didn't take knowing someone to know when they were acting differently. And, in a way, Doc now technically knew why she was acting differently – father dead, crater in her shoulder, being thirty years out of her element.

But that didn't include him knowing that every word, every glance, and every room they shared drove her to safeguard the darkest source of her pain.

Their pain.

"Em?"

Marty knocked twice before easing the door open. Emma stared ahead, glassy-eyed.

"He expressed condolences to me for his own death."

"You told him what happens to him?"

She shook her head, looking up at him hazily. "No. It was just strange, him saying it and not realizing that it was about him."

Marty blinked, the expression on his face slowly shifting.

"Don't you think we should tell him?"

"Tell him what?"

"That he gets…shot."

Emma huffed. "What if it doesn't work like that? What if time is a matter of predestination? Then, no matter what we said or he did, he _had_ to be killed in that moment."

"It doesn't _have_ to happen," Marty snorted. "My entire family is being erased from existence because I interfered with my parents meeting. If there was a grand scheme at hand, was my role in it to be born just to see to it that I wasn't?"

Emma squinted at him, and he rolled his eyes.

_Just like her dad._

"You're the scientist of the two of us," he said, motioning between them. "You're the daughter of the smartest man I know. Isn't human error still an error where predestination is concerned? Because I messed up big time, and if I don't fix it by Saturday night, nothing is going to magically get them together. Years down the line? Maybe. But then what if they'd decide not to have kids? Or they'd have kids, but they wouldn't be me, Dave, or Linda?"

He sat down where Doc had been minutes before, pleading with her. "All I'm saying is, let's not give up hope just yet."

Emma studied him, the wheels in her head considering his theory in accordance to what her not-yet-father had said. While that guy's attitude and naivety sometimes made her want to jettison him across a room, her actual father had only performed a time jump, not elaborated on a theory on whether or not history could be altered by their actions in another point in time.

Of course, why couldn't they? What _did_ make it so different? Marty was right; people were still people no matter what year it was, and their actions and reactions were just as history-altering as the time machine itself.

She quirked her lips to the side. "But then say my dad was shot here in 1955. Mortally wounded. Does he die? Or _can't_ he, because he's destined to be shot in 1985?"

Marty produced a hard scorn. "Do you want to find a gun and test your theory?"

"No," she said dismissively, running her hands down the pages of the book absentmindedly. "If I were wrong, we couldn't get home."

"Exactly."

Her eyebrows knit together. "And he'd never invent the flux capacitor that sent us here to shoot him, especially me, as I am his daughter. And if you don't exist by Saturday, that's a really big problem. Technically, it would be impossible for us to even _be_ here. Like, incredibly impossible."

Marty stared at her big eyes. They waited patiently for him to acknowledge and add to her running theory. Instead, he clicked his tongue and stood up. It had been six minutes. The morphine had finally taken her.

"Good talk," he said, nodding once as he pocketed him hands. "We'll revisit this saving-your-dad thing later."

Her eyes got bigger still. "What if our being here and telling him about the flux capacitor actually influenced him to make it?" she asked passionately.  
"He already hit his head by the time we showed up!"

"Okay, he gets the vision, but say he doesn't pursue it unless we had shown up to inspire him to work on it all those years," she said. "_Then_ we're just stuck in some infinite time loop where our present circumstances are dictated by things we haven't even done yet, or things we didn't know we were going to do ten years into our biological future, but thirty years into time's past –"

"See you in the morning, Em."

Emma stopped speaking abruptly when the door was shut and began sliding around on the wall. Her train of thought leaked away, and she looked back down at the book. The words and symbols and parentheses continued to tilt to and fro; the morphine was pulling her under in a pleasant blur, away from the sickening vertigo of this horrible, distorted reality.

Blinking, Emma closed the book and turned off the bedside lamp. She wriggled down into bed on her right side, resting her head in the warmth of the pillow she'd had behind her back. Soon, her breathing evened out, and she wrapped her fingers around the spine of her father's book, tucking a corner of it under her chin as she welcomed a dreamless sleep.

* * *

School. How was a horrific emergency like accidental time travel and possible nonexistence not reason enough to have the week off from school? Couldn't they just sleep in a little bit longer? Did they have to wake up even earlier than usual to wrestle themselves into the fashions of fifties high school?

Apparently so.

Emma's shoulder was quite limiting when it came to a basic morning routine: doing her hair, zipping her dress, putting on her sweater. When it came to whether she should ask her not-yet-father or Marty for help in zipping up her orange and white polka dot dress, she put more thought into it than even she deemed necessary. _Who do you want to see your bra strap for the rest of the week, Emma?_ That was the real question. They both knew she was temporarily handicapped and would be mature about it, but still – this guy that didn't know she trusted him because he's her dad or her friend that she came here with that she happened to be getting stupid in the head about more and more often.

Well, they had both cut her shirt and bra off her two days ago anyway, so a lot of help that was.

Doc ultimately served as their mother hen for the morning, moving between their two bedrooms several times to help them become one of the natives. Dumping flammable tonic in Marty's hair, zipping up Emma's dress in her doorway, restyling Marty's hair, crowning Emma with a bright white headband, holding her white cardigan as she tried to slip it on with as little discomfort as possible. By the time he had them fed and out the door, he was asking the good lord above to spare him the joy of having twins someday.

Emmett parked across the street from the high school, and the three of them entered the building bustling with a multitude of students. They wove their way to a stairwell entrance flanked by two trophy cases where Doc bent over between Emma and Marty and asked, "Which one's your pop?"

Not that we was entirely hard to point out, Marty did so. And as they observed George McFly, bandy-legged and frustrated from unsuccessfully avoiding multiple kicks to his ankles and calves, Emma felt Marty's embarrassment color her own cheeks. In her few encounters with Mr. McFly, she could understand why Marty didn't linger on any talk of his dad. But seeing books slapped out of his hands and Strickland reprimanding him made her feel awful.

Doc said what they'd all thought at some point in the last thirty seconds: "What did your mother ever see in that kid?"

"I don't know, Doc. I guess she felt sorry for him because her dad hit him with the car." A pause. Emma watched him reach for the back of his head slowly. "…He hit _me_ with the car."

"That's the Florence Nightingale Effect," Emmett said. "It happens in hospitals, when nurses fall in love with their patients."

Emma smiled at the brown and tan tiles. _Oh, Dad. I hope you hear yourself._

"She's at her locker now," Doc said, peering around the corner to the next hallway. Lorraine was down a-ways, past the pep rally poster exchanging some books while two other girls beamed at her seemingly endless chatter. Doc gave them both a pat on the back to get a move on, and Emma's mouth and eyes jumped opened as Marty swooped in on George.

She glared expectantly at her father, rigid. "Ow."

"Ah." Emmett lowered his hand apologetically. "Should I take you home?"

"No way."

Emmett frowned. "I still think you should be resting."

"But I'm not. I'm helping. And you said yourse-"

Suddenly, George McFly was standing right in front of her and her not-yet-father. Tightlipped and juggling his books, George summoned up a timid smile. "Hi."

Emma blinked, smiling through her discomfort. "Hi."

"You look… very nice today."

Doc raised an eyebrow. Emma's polite smile grew cautiously. "Well, thank you. That's very nice of you…"

"George!" Marty backtracked a few feet to where his dad had slipped out of his grasp. He made a face at Doc and Emma's stiff postures until Doc's eyes bore into Marty's sharply, darting from him to Emma and back again.

Marty cleared his throat. He swung his arm around George's shoulder again, patting him on the chest. "There's someone _further _down the hall I'd like you to meet."

George shrunk a little. "Oh."

"I've already met you, besides," Emma said. "I'm Marty's sister, Emma. From the café."

If possible, George deflated more, recalling the circumstances of their first meeting. "Yeah."

"Come on, George. This way, buddy."

As Marty steered him down the hall, George looked back. "Have a good day, Emma."

She swallowed. "You, too."

Once Marty successfully got George down to Lorraine's locker, Emma chanced a glance up at her father. His face was grave as they made eye contact.

"He was just saying hi," Emma said dismissively, trying to convince herself of the same. "The poor kid almost spilt milk all over me when he met me."

Doc's expression didn't change. "You should have stayed home."

And Emma wasn't really sure she could argue against that now.

She stayed quiet as they watched Lorraine make dreamy eyes at Marty rather than George, her friends grinning ear-to-ear during the whole affair. George slunked off without as much as an acknowledgement that he was there, ducking into the nearest classroom when the bell rang. Her friends dragging her in their direction, Emma and Doc froze as she ran right by them gushing, "Isn't he a dreamboat?"

_Well, shit._

Emma ran the tip of her tongue along her teeth. "That's not good."

"Damn it," Doc muttered. "Damn it, damn it, damn it…"

Emma followed him toward Marty slowly, rubbing her fingernails in thought. Marty ceased his pacing when they reached him. He looked frantic.

"Doc, she didn't even look at him."

"This is a lot more serious than I thought," Doc said, leading them down the hall. "Apparently your mother is amorously infatuated with you instead of your father."

Marty stopped. He glared at Emma, and her lips disappeared inside her mouth.

"Whoa, wait a minute, Doc. Are you trying to tell me that my mother…has got the hots for _me_?"

"At the risk of sounding crude, precisely. And what's worse! Your father speaking to Emma!"

"He was just saying hi!"

"Yes, practically tripping over himself to do so."

Marty's groaned. He couldn't exactly write Doc's theory off. Not when he remembered his mother _pinching his _knee under the dinner table or how George had look so put out when he realized Emma was not the person he was being introduced to. He looked up at Emma when she fell into step with him. He felt winded.

"Promise me you're as disturbed as I am right now."

"I cannot coherently explain how disturbed I am."

Emmett passed between them to get them back on task, speaking fervently. "The only way we're going to get those two to successfully mate is if they are alone together," he pressed. "So you've got to get your father and mother to interact… in some sort of…social…"

"What do you mean? Like a date?" Marty supplied.

"Right!"

"Well, what kind of date? I don't know what kids do in the fifties."

Emma shrugged. "Same as any other kids, wouldn't you think? Movies, milkshakes."

Doc rounded Marty. "They're your parents, Marty! You must know them. What are their common interests?" he mused. "What do they like to do together?"

"…Nothing."

Emma tossed her head to the side in reluctant agreement as Doc walked up to a nearby poster. Marty has rarely mentioned his parents collectively when he did. 'My dad this' or 'my mother that,' but never 'they did this or that.' To be honest, though, Emma wasn't even sure Marty knew what his parents liked to _do_, let alone do _together._

"Look! There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up!"

Marty's outburst took Emma by surprise. "Of course! The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance! They're supposed to go to this! That's where they kiss for the first time!"

"Really?"

"My mom has told that story more times than I can count," Marty told Emma. "I'm surprised you've never heard it as much as she recites it. You'd think it was the only thing that had happened to her in her entire life."

"All right, kid." Doc tugged at Marty's jacket emphatically. "You stick to your father like glue and make sure he takes her to the dance!"

* * *

Things in cafeteria could have gone better. Perhaps it was just the way the universe hated them right now. But Marty managed to have Emma slip away with him when Doc went to the restroom despite her growing protests to the idea. She could tell George liked Lorraine. That wasn't a question. He had been such a gentleman to her in the café on Saturday morning, and it was a shame he wasn't confident enough to build on that kind of potential.

Their approach was strong; keep the energy high while telling George all these things never overhead Lorraine say and skirting around his increasingly open reception towards Emma. Then, when Marty had decided to defend the honor of his mother in a fist fight with Biff Tannen, Emma was restraining his drawn-back arm when Strickland showed up, glaring at Biff when he called her "sweet cheeks" again. With that, George had escaped, as quickly has the whole thing had ended.

Marty planned to cover the most likely exit George would take at the end of the day to corner him. By then, he agreed it should be a father-future son talk and that Emma was best just meet him back at the mansion. Happy she wouldn't have to assume an air of polite ignorance for the rest of the day, Emma blended in with a couple of textbooks at the last bell and sought out the nearest exit.

"Hey! Wait!"

Emma stopped at the bottom of the stairwell, moving off to the side as students swarmed around her. She looked up as Lorraine came trotting down that stairs towards her. Emma looked towards the door longingly, blinking as Lorraine appeared right in front of her. Her shoulder puckered uncomfortably as she held her schoolbooks tighter.

"You're Calvin's sister, right? Ella?"

"Emma."

"Emma," Lorraine smiled politely. "Um, is your brother seeing anyone?"

Emma felt her mouth hang open slightly, levelly staring at this girl. Speaking over the shudder in her chest, Emma feigned a regretful grimace.

"He actually has a date with a girl next week, and he's _really_ excited about it."

Lorraine's face fell. "He does?"

"Yeah."

"But she's not his girlfriend, right?"

"…Right…"

"Great!"

Emma's stare grew incredulous at Lorraine's spectacular recovery. Lorraine seemed to pay no-never-mind, however, shrugging her dainty shoulders with a bright smile.

"So, listen, tomorrow after school, me and my friends are going to Lou's for malts and would love for you to join us."

"I don't know. I have a lot of homework."

"Come on! You'll love it. Babs and Betty are really nice."

Emma glanced at the door again, simultaneously wishing Marty would intervene and be miles away. Ultimately, she could probably name drop George McFly until her subliminal message got through, and any time Marty brought George around, she could help shift Lorraine's attention in George's direction. Perhaps she could turn this undesired invitation into some kind of opportunity to set things in motion. Lord knows they've only been going backwards.

While it still went against her instincts, Emma made herself nod.

"All right."

"Oh, perfect," Lorraine cooed. "We'll save you a seat at lunch tomorrow."

"…Sure."

* * *

Emma entered the lab, swiftly moving around the DeLorean to where Marty was rummaging through her father's suitcase from 1985. She came to a halt at the sight, unprepared for the small flip her stomach did.

"What are you doing?"

Marty looked up, his hands slowing at the sharp hollowness of her gaze. He swallowed, motioning to the suitcase.

"I was just looking for something."

Emma nodded, mentally shaking off her momentary stupor. "It's fine, I'm sorry. Go ahead."

At that, Marty turned back to the suitcase, continuing his careful search. Emma clasped her hands in front of her and let out a sigh.

"Marty, your mother invited me to tell her everything about you after school tomorrow."

Marty shut his eyes and made a face. "Are you serious?"

"I see it," she said, folding her hands behind her back, "as a chance to tell her what a loser you are and build George up."

Marty huffed out a laugh at her 'innocent' smile, untangling the hair dryer cord from Doc's clothes. "Hey, that's not bad."

"Thought you'd like that."

"Build him up a lot. It'll be a good preamble to him asking her out tomorrow."

Emma pinched her eyebrows together at the certainty of his tone. "What are you doing?"

"Giving him a violent shove while you give my mom a gentle nudge."

"Wh-?"

"Trust me; the first thing he's going to do tomorrow is hunt down Lorraine."

"Are you giving him a makeover?"

Marty smiled as he posed with the hair dryer and winked.

"I was thinking more along the lines of melting his brain."

**. Please Review .**


	10. Never A Dull Moment

**CHAPTER NINE  
**_**Never A Dull Moment**_

Tuesday, November 8, 1955  
12:16 AM

Emmett Brown's Packard convertible hummed quietly down the streets of Hill Valley near midnight, its headlights washing the pristine pavement in long, soft beams of white light. Turning into Sycamore Street, Emmett crawled to a stop along the left curb. Lobbing the gearshift into park, he, Marty, and Emma looked across the street at 1711 Sycamore nestled quietly between two quaint suburban homes.

"That's the one, Doc," Marty said, leaning between him and Emma from the backseat. "I gotta get through the second floor window."

"How are you going to get up there?" Emma asked.

"There's some kind of ivy fence along the right side of the house," Marty said, adjusting the hair dryer on the belt of his radiation suit. "It should get me to the porch roof. If not, I may need a boost."

He nudged Emma's arm with a wink, completely forgetting it was her bad arm until her eyes grew from the shock of the pain. The moment her face contorted, Emma squeezed her upper arm to stem the pain, Emmett threw his hand over her mouth to mute her scream, and Marty began whispering his apology profusely.

"Oh shit, Em, I'm sorry! I didn't hit the actual spot, did I?"

Emma hissed a few quick breaths as Doc lowered his hand. After a deep, long exhale, her eyes fluttered open again, and she relaxed her grip on her arm as she looked over at it. She shook her head.

"You should have taken your morphine shot before we came out here," Emmett said.

"So it wouldn't hurt as bad when Marty assaulted my shoulder?"

"I nudged your arm, smartass."

"It still hurts, dipshit!"

"Hey hey hey, alright alright alright! That'll be enough of that," Emmett said sternly, looking between the two of them. His eyes stopped on Emma for half a moment.

…_Dipshit?_

Regrouping, Emmett pointed at Marty. "Got everything?"

"Yeah." He smiled at Emma and Doc, hopping over the car door to the sidewalk. "Wish me luck."

"Good luck," Emma whispered as he made long, silent strides up the street

With the dim moonlight creating sharp edges on the jutting cross beams and enhancing the deep lines in the towering pillars of swirled stone and brick, the house seemed rather intimidating. Emma was sure in the daylight it was lovely, but as she and Doc watched Marty disappear into the shadows to the right of the house she tried to swallow her apprehension. Moments later, his yellow radiation suit was scaling the trellis, carefully traversing the large spaces between the narrow beams, and pulling itself up onto the second story balcony.

Emma let out a sigh as Marty slipped into the house. Relieved that he hadn't fallen when navigating the cross beams, a smile of admiration rested on her lips for him not having done so.

"Well, he's in now," Emmett said. He checked his watch on the inside of his left wrist. "Hopefully he's not in there more than ten minutes. Lord only know what happens if his grandparents wake up."

"He knows what he's doing," Emma said, covering her mouth as a deep yawn followed.

"I do wish you had stayed back to get some sleep," Emmett said. "How bad is your shoulder right now?"

"Not awful. I took an extra hydrocodone before we left." She looked up at the house, shrugging into the warmth of her coat as a small breeze passed over. "You know, if you had another hair dryer, I'd be up there. I don't know how I would do it with a bad arm, but I would." She smiled. "I can't let Marty have all the fun."

Emmett smiled back up at the house. These two kids…they certainly seemed like brother and sister. Though he did not know of many sincere boy-girl friendships, they seemed to have it down pat, even to the point that they could throw a sailor's profanities at one another without consequence. The boy had pleaded for her life on his lawn not forty-eight hours ago, and she demanded to be on the front with him to right the situation despite her wound. He was still trying to fathom their loyalty to him, but perhaps it wasn't so hard to do so if he looked at the loyalty they held to each other.

"So, this nurse that fixed me up," – Emma stole a glance at her not-yet-father, slightly amused at how quickly his expression darkened at her mention – "how do you know she won't tell anyone?"

Emmett harrumphed, his feathers ruffled instantly.

"That nurse doesn't bother herself with the details of my 'pathetic little life,' 'pitiful research,' and my experiments that are 'absolutely laughable.'" He glared through George's house with a scowl. "Never mind she got a sizeable check to go spend sauntering about Pismo with the new physics professor, the thick-headed imbecile." He planted his elbow on the top of the car door, gesturing into the air as he spoke. "He has a doctorate in astronomy, but that's hardly physics, is it? What a disgrace. Allowing that man to teach a field he hasn't even a mind for? Not that he has a mind for much. The size of his forehead is not the least bit deceiving to me. Though it pales in comparison to the size of his chin."

Emmett rested his own chin on his thumb, his other fingers curling around his mouth as he brooded. After a moment of silence, he looked sideways at Emma, deepening his eyebrows further at the wide smile on her face.

"What?" he demanded.

Emma tried to bite back her large grin, looking at the glove box. "You'll see her again. You know that, right? As passionately as you two hate each other –"

"Don't you threaten me like that."

She laughed as the bushes in the distance rustled loudly. A dog began barking, and across the street, Marty was making a light-footed break for the car. He jumped into the backseat, short of breath but smiling.

"Mission accomplished then?" Emma asked.

"Perfectly," Marty said, detaching the helmet from his suit. "He swallowed everything like a ton of bricks."

Emmett made a face as he started the car, shifted it into drive, and pulled away from the curb. "You mix metaphors beautifully, my friend."

* * *

It took them until second block to realize George was not in the building. Their systematic search turned up nothing; he was either ditching out of fear or skipping town all together. Marty said as much in the library as Emma skimmed through the shelves on the vacant second floor.

She smirked. "I doubt he's on the lamb," she said, putting H.G. Wells back on a low shelf. She took the book right next to it, an older edition of the same story, and leafed through the yellowed, careworn pages. "You probably just used too much chloroform. I was out for hours after Dad gave me just a little bit, and that was through stitches."

Marty grimaced and pocketed his hands. She had a point. And as dark as it had been, it shouldn't have been a surprise that the bottle was lighter than expected when he left the house.

"Damn it. He's probably in a coma. Hell, how do I know my grandparents didn't find him unresponsive and take him to the hospital?" He exhaled soundly. "You think you should still go to the café?"

"Yes," Emma said immediately. "I have to talk him up as much as possible as quickly as possible. This is the best time to do it. The only time."

Marty fell into a nearby armchair. "You're right."

Emma watched him cradle his head in his hand. As stressed as this had him, a smile came to her as she turned back to the bookshelves.

"So," – she touched the edges of the pages slowly – "of the two photos you keep on your person, one of them is my senior picture?"

Marty's head snapped up. She took up the armchair across from him, still smiling into the pages of _The Time Machine_. Marty shrugged when she finally looked up, aloof.

"Yeah. Your picture is in my wallet. So what?"

"Yours went right in my locker."

"Maybe I don't want it in my locker. Maybe it's in my wallet for a reason."

Emma played along. "And what's that?"

"Kindling."

"Kindling?"

"You never know, Em."

* * *

Before Emma was to meet Lorraine in front of the auditorium at the last bell, she ducked into its stairwell with Marty. The plan was to follow her at a distance, lingering at the Texaco across the street to get a play-by-play afterwards. She squared her shoulders best she could, smiled at his encouraging "you got this," and left the auditorium just as Lorraine came around the corner.

Lou's Café was packed.

Now crammed into one of the slick, teal booths next to Betty, Emma's stomach turned slightly under her best attempt at a girlish persona. She looked out the window as her hands fidgeted with her brown gingham skirt; Marty stood leisurely across the street as promised, unaffected by the blaring jukebox and rowdy students suffocating her.

Then, to her astonishment, George himself came flying around the corner, disheveled and panting, gesticulating wildly at Marty. Goosebumps rose on her skin; this was it.

_I really hope Marty got through to him last night with that hairdryer._

"Did you say that George McFly writes _books_?"

Betty tapped the ashes from her cigarette and looked at Babs and Lorraine, confirming they were just as surprised to learn this as she. Emma pulled eyes from the window abruptly, eagerly nodding as she flashed them bright smile. She curled her fingers into her skirt more. While that may not have exactly been the truth, she was ready to take George to the next level for the sake of getting Lorraine's attention.

"Oh, yeah! He actually showed me some of his work at lunch yesterday. Pages of it! He's got quite the knack for it."

"Who knew!" Betty laughed.

Lorraine edged in meekly. "Does Calvin write books? Poetry, maybe?"

Emma huffed out a laugh, waving dismissively. "Get out of town. My brother doesn't do any of that kind of stuff."

"Oh."

"But George, _wow_; that's just the tip of the iceberg," Emma continued, rolling her eyes. She threw her curled hair over her good shoulder, leaning forward earnestly. "He's polite, gets straight A's, and he knows a lot about planetary and space sciences."

Lorraine raised her eyebrows in amusement. "_Space _sciences?"

"Yeah! All about the planets, the sun; stars, asteroids, moons, black holes, you name it. _Very_ high caliber stuff."

As the girls had a silent, bewildered exchange, Emma caught sight of George hurrying over to the café out of the corner of her eye. Her heart rate picked up, anticipation fluttering in her stomach as she stared at the cherry sinking into her strawberry malt. She took a sip to try to quell the butterflies.

"We should see if he'll take you to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance this weekend," Betty said, taking another long drag from her cigarette.

Emma choked on her malt, coughing into a napkin as Lorraine and Bab's faces lit up.

"Oh my gosh, yes!"

The butterflies plummeted. She set aside the napkin, her malt souring in her throat.

"No, no, no," Emma half-laughed, shaking her head quickly. "I don't want to go to the dance with George."

"Don't be so shy, Emma," Lorraine smiled. "It's obvious you do."

Emma wanted to scream. "No, I really don't! I don't like him like that!"

"But you do!"

"This isn't about me!"

"Of course not; it's all been about George."

Dear god, how was she losing control of this conversation so fast?

"Come on, Emma." Babs pulled her cherry stem out of her mouth, smirking at her. "You haven't stopped talking about him since we left school."

Emma took a deep breath, forcing her hands flat on her knees. Panicking wasn't appropriate; they had simply misunderstood, and she just had to steer the conversation back on track and suggest that _Lorraine_ be interested in him. Because this was getting ridiculous, not to mention dangerous.

"Guys, really," she said evenly, "I don't-"

Lorraine perked up suddenly with a light gasp. "Oh my god, there he is!"

"Call him over!"

"What? No! No, Lorraine –"

"He's coming over!" Babs squealed. "He's coming over!"

"Don't!"

"Shh!"

Emma paled. She tried shaking her head at their mischievous grins, but Lorraine was waving him over, and her mouth went dry. She immediately tried to stand up and remove herself from the situation, but Betty quickly yanked her back down by the arm, making her hiss as pain jolted from her shoulder. By the time Betty let go, George was at their table, eyeing Lorraine. Emma held her breath as George held up a small notepad said Lorraine's name.

"My density has bought me to… you…" He trailed off upon seeing Emma on the other side of the table and blinked. "Hi, Emma."

She shrunk, swallowing hard. She daren't look at him. "Hello, George."

Babs looked between the two of them. "Emma was just talking about you."

And George's eyes went as wide as Emma's. She kicked her under the table.

"Babs!"

"Really?"

"Yeah." Betty exhaled a wisp of smoke. "She hasn't shut up about you yet."

"She was just asking us if we knew who you were taking to the dance on Saturday night," Lorraine said, toying with her straw.

"Well, uh, n-no one yet."

"Then don't you think you should ask Lorraine to go with you?" Emma asked pointedly.

"Me? You're the one who keeps talking about him!" Lorraine laughed. "George, wouldn't you like to take Emma to the dance?"

To her horror, George started to smile. "Sure."

"Perfect!"

"N- Wait a minute," Emma demanded, springing up in front of George. She was about to poke him in the chest with her finger, set him straight, and handcuff him to Lorraine when Biff's voice boomed in their direction, seemingly silencing the jukebox and its listeners.

"Hey, McFly."

Emma slowly shut her eyes, her lips hard and thin with mounting frustration.

_Are you serious right now?_

"I thought I told you never to come in here."

_Don't hit him, Emma. Don't do it. _

"Well, it's gonna cost you. How much money you got on you?"

Vision darkening, Emma glared at Biff, daring him to come another step closer lest he get his other eye flicked, but just as recognition registered on his face, he tripped. Emma jumped back as others began to rise from their seats, wondering when Marty had managed to sneak within earshot of their table.

_Why the hell didn't he stop that train wreck of a conversation from happening then?_

Marty threw her a quick nod before Biff slowly rose over him, draining the faces of his onlookers. Emma craned her neck around Biff's tensed muscles to Marty's widening eyes. Her own muscles tightened in her calves and forearms; her shoulder objected, but she was mentally preparing herself to intervene. She may not throw a solid right hook, but she had enough fingernail to make scratches hurt and heels high enough that she could stab a pressure point to cause significant recoil. Never mind she was in a dress playing spy in 1955 with a concealed bullet wound – he'd never see it coming.

"Whoa, whoa, Biff! What's that?"

Emma leaned back instinctively when Biff looked over his shoulder, looking in the direction Marty had motioned to herself. Brow furrowed, she looked back just in time to see Biff and his cronies falling into the tables and people in front of her. Marty made a mad dash for the front door.

"That's Calvin Klein," Lorraine purred from behind her. "He's an absolute dream."

Emma rolled her eyes, hurrying over fallen students after Marty.

"He's absolutely dead if Biff gets him!"

Someone shoved her forward by the small of her back. Her feet picked off the ground for a second as the afternoon rush poured out onto the sidewalk, carrying it with her. Landing just at the corner, she caught her breath, somehow amazed that someone hadn't rammed into her shoulder during their impatient bustling to –

– to see Marty…skateboarding?...away from Biff's car.

"What's that thing he's on?"

"It's a board with wheels!"

Her feet wouldn't move. Ready to race after Biff's car and jump on the idiot, her feet were cemented to the curb. She couldn't do anything. At least when Marty had been hit by his grandfather's car, she could get him some help. But now? Biff was taking out hedges and driving over curbs just to keep Marty in his sights. Her shoulders fell in relief when he grabbed the back of a vehicle and swung out of Biff's path, only to be pinned moments later.

His legs were going to be crushed. His legs were going to be crushed, and she couldn't carry him all the way back to the manor –

Marty jumped. The makeshift skateboard zipped under the black roaring beast behind it, and Marty hopped, skipped, and slid through the car; over the windshield, over everyone's legs, right off the pristine back end where his feet firmly reunited with their newfound friend. Wobbling but keeping his balance, Marty cringed as the De Luxe's brakes squealed and its passengers barreled into a manure truck.

"Marty!"

Emma came at him as fast as Biff had, her face flush. "Are you okay?"

He nodded and smirked. "Never better."

Marty kicked the skateboard up to his hand, giving it back to the boy he apparently borrowed it from.

At this effervescent display of cocky showmanship, Emma's expression darkened. Now was not the time for Van Halen to appease the adoring fans.

"Are you _stupid_?"

"What?"

"How many more times are you going to try to take on a car? You lost last time, remember?"

"Actually," – touched the back of his head – "no."

Emma nodded, tightlipped. "That's because _the car won_, you idiot."

He took Emma by the elbow, leading her out of the gathering crowd. "How does a peanut butter sandwich and iced tea sound?"

"This isn't over, McFly."

"Crunchy it is."

**. Please Review .**


	11. Clock Wise

**Hi, everyone! Sorry for the delay. This was one of those chapters where, despite it having one of the very first scenes I fleshed out for this series, that fine line of fitting the OC in without spitting the script back at you but maintaining the original story reared its head at me. I've been having that issue with some other chapters down the line, but the next three are already entirely ready. I'll still post them at weekly intervals to give myself some time to figure out the later ones and collect feedback, but they're good to go! And I want to thank you all so much for your critiques and acceptance of Emma. This is my first attempt at a rewrite with an OC, and I love the challenges it brings. The payoff is how much you enjoy her as _part_ of the story, not because it's _her_ story. So, here is a longer chapter with my gratitude! Please enjoy and let me know what you thought!**

**And if anyone is into this enough to be a beta... You know what they say, you can't catch every grammatical and/or spelling error yourself. Hit me up! :)**

* * *

**CHAPTER TEN  
**_**Clock Wise**_

Tuesday, November 8, 1955  
4:26 PM

Wherein Emmett Brown was not entirely preoccupied with the fact that he had built a time machine, he would have been able to appreciate this marvelously intriguing video equipment with his undivided attention. Of course the flux capacitor was grander on every scale, but only as far as he knew. How would a simple recording device, even mass-produced, outweigh the significance of time travel?

He had the opportunity to figure out the buttons here and there; referencing parts of the video to better understand the experiment as a whole or study a freeze-frame of the time circuits. He frowned every time he thought of the cab of that white van filled with the notes, schematics, and blueprints for the DeLorean, his lip twitching as he longed to have only a glimpse at them. Perhaps even with that, he'd have more confidence in getting Marty and Emma home.

Moving his pencil from between his teeth to his breast pocket, Emmett lifted his green-rimmed goggles and hit the rewind button, watching the fire trails dissolve on screen. In the quiet afternoon - shafts of sunlight striking through the dust particles of the lab, the high-pitched whirring of the device in his hand - his thoughts steered him slightly off-course as the tape ended.

_They found me._

_ I don't know how, but they found me._

He swallowed, fingers slick on the controls.

_Run for it._

The fear emanating from his elderly eyes struck him right through the television screen. His voice was some kind of shrill bark. It rattled him briefly to think that something could send him reeling into such a panicked state. What was worse was the slow realization that manifested on his face, knowing something terrible was about to happen.

Emmett blinked, rewinding and replaying.

His future self had said, "they found me," not "us."

Marty and Emma showed up wearing the same clothes from the video, disheveled and desperate. Emma's radiation suit, as crisp and fine as his and Marty's in the tape, had been crumpled in the DeLorean with a small entry point and a large halo of blood when he discovered it Sunday morning.

Whatever he's done to whomever had found him, it had almost gotten them killed.

What had he done to endanger those kids like that?

Rewinding once more, the weight of the unknown settled greatly on his person. He daren't deliberate a second more, but he wasn't stupid.

_Run for it._

…Had he run fast enough?

"Doc?"

Emmett gripped the camcorder to avoid sending it skyward at Marty's voice. Wide-eyed at seeing the two teenagers just beyond the DeLorean, Emmett began stumbling to his feet, his voice thick and somber when he found it.

"Oh, hi, Marty. Emma. I didn't hear you come in." Part for cover, part to recollect himself, and part because he couldn't take the pity in their eyes, he looked down at the camcorder. "Fascinating device, this video unit."

He sat it on top of the television as Marty and Emma regarded his tensed shoulders. He shut his eyes and swallowed quickly with his back to them, staying the unexpected urge to apologize. It was, first and foremost, his fault they were here. And it seemed it might also be his fault for the circumstances in which that came to be.

"Doc," – Emmett frowned, steeling himself against Marty's soft-spoken tone – "you know, there's something we haven't told you about the night we made that –"

_No. Not a word. It would not be spoken of._

His voice rushed over Marty's loudly, desperate to drown out whatever would come after the end of that sentence. "Please, Marty, don't tell me," he demanded, moving past Emma to the long hook attached to the Delorean. "No man should know too much about his own destiny."

"Doc, you don't understand –"

"I _do_ understand!" he insisted in his frustration.

_I understand just enough._

"If I know too much about my own future, I could endanger my own existence," – Emmett spun to Marty, driving his point home – "just as you've endangered yours!"

Emma, willing the redness from her unblinking eyes, glanced between them in the tight silence. It was clear they had interrupted his inevitable piecing together of events, and his adamancy of overriding Marty's frightfully instinctive need to fill in the gaps all but assured her that he didn't want to come to the finality of a conclusion. Whether he'd reached the correct one on his own or not, it was imperative it not be spoken of.

Skin aflame at the daunting precipice, Emma suppressed a shudder at the way her not-yet father's eyes bored this message into Marty. Her friend had his heart in the same place she did, but, selfishly, she was as unprepared for this conversation as her dad was.

At long last, Marty yielded, making his hands do something to ease the air of their strained exchange. "You're – you're right."

With that, speculations died and a smile rose on Doc's face. Allowing herself to breathe again, the taut apprehension in Emma's chest diminished as he guided their attention to a white mass atop a ping pong table.

"Now, let me show you my plan for sending you home."

Coming around to its side, Emma's mouth opened, astonishment working a smile into the corners of her lips. A large, bright model of Hill Valley's town square was lain across the expanse of the tabletop. Everything from milk bottles, tackle and tool boxes, nails, and matchbooks were arranged in admirable detail to recreate the square. Her model of Pompeii for World History three years ago came to mind, widening her grin at how he had "improved" it after she went to bed the night before it was due.

Emma looked back at Marty, almost chuckling; chalk this up as yet another time where, when her father had presented something to them, her reaction was as enthusiastic as his silence was stunned.

"Please excuse the crudity of this model. I didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it."

At this, Emma did laugh. Emmett narrowed his eyes at her, looking back at Marty.

"What's wrong? I know it's only a few hours' worth of work, b—"

"No, nothing, no." Marty said, patting him on the arm. "It's good."

"It's great," Emma assured him, stepping around to his other side. "Really."

"Well, thank you," Doc said as Marty joined Emma. "Thank you."

With Emma still smiling and Marty pocketing his hands, he received their undivided attention, adjusted his sleeves with a shrug of his shoulders, and touched the nail at the top of the model clock tower.

"Okay now. We run some industrial-strength electrical cable from the top of the clock tower," – their eyes followed his finger along the red and white "cable" – "down, to spreading it over the street between these two lamp posts.

"Meanwhile," he continued, crossing to the DeLorean, "we've outfitted the time vehicle with this big pole and hook which runs directly into the flux capacitor." He picked up a red-orange toy car, placing it on the further end of the table. "At the calculated moment, you start off down the street driving directly toward the cable, accelerating to eighty-eight miles per hour."

Emma lined herself up at the other end of the table, leaning down to examine how the car and cable would unite. She looked up at Doc's finger hovering over the nail again, the tiny face of a wristwatch set to their departure time just below it.

His hands danced about the model during his exposé. "According to the flyer, at precisely 10:04 PM this Saturday night, lightning will strike the clock tower, electrifying the cable just as the connecting hook makes contact, thereby sending 1.21 gigawatts into the flux capacitor and sending you back to 1985."

Marty's hands went deeper into his pockets as Emma stood straight, her brown skirt brushing against him as she rejoined him off to the side of the table. She raised her eyebrows at him, and he seemed to concede with a shrug that _yeah, not bad._

"Alright now, watch this." Emmett clapped his hands together and handed Marty the toy car. "You wind up the car and release it," – Marty did so, both he and Emma creasing their brows at the giant plug Doc held up with fervor – "I'll simulate the lightning."

Emma's eyes lit up. "I want to be the lightning!"

"You're in the car," Doc said, deflating her. Withholding a grumble, she put a hand on her hip as Marty readied the car and the large, black plug entered the wall socket. She felt a further pang of jealousy as he lowered his goggles and held up two clamps; she hadn't gotten to play with electricity properly in weeks.

"Ready?"

Marty made a face that put a little humor back onto Emma's own, and Doc connected one of the clamps to the nearest lamppost. The other hung open in wait next to the large nail.

"Set."

Marty placed the nose of the car at the white line down the "street." Another second on bated breath, Doc finally gave the go-ahead: "Release!"

A series of high-pitched whines and squeals came from the car when Marty's hands pulled away. Moving forward in earnest, Emma watched the little car zip down the stretch of green road, itching with anticipation as the second clamp met the nail with a robust sizzle. A white streak of current leapt down the cable, its crackle erupting with a small _boom_ and not-so-small burst of sparks that sent all three of them jumping backward in alarm.

The toy car, however, seemed totally unfazed by the fact that it was on fire. It passed the cabled lampposts and went through the model movie theater happily ablaze, continuing off the table with no-never mind until it steered itself into a pile of rags and ignited them. Waving the smoke away, Emma and Marty sounded off with disjointed coughs, following after Doc as he seized the fire extinguisher from a nearby beam and turned it on the mischievous car's handiwork.

Emma grimaced. "Shall I hunt down flame-retardant clothing?"

"You extol me with a lot of confidence as well, Doc."

"Don't worry," Emmett said, finishing off the last of the flames. "I'll take care of the lightning; you just take care of your pop. By the way," – he folded the hose back onto the extinguisher – "what happened today? Did he ask her out?"

Complete and utter terror befell Emma at his words. Her father was simply curious to know if the previous night's endeavor had produced the desired results, but her body was screaming at the thought of shattering his hopes. And it didn't help that Marty was answering in the affirmative, albeit hesitantly.

He had no idea. He hadn't stopped the conversation at the café because he didn't hear it, and it was never brought up on their way back due to their bickering over his skateboarding stunt.

_Damn it. _

"What did she say?"

_This isn't going to be pretty._

Emma shut her eyes, exhaling soundly. "Marty, wait. He didn't—"

_Knock. Knock. Knock._

It might as well have been the undertaker himself when Doc announced that it was Marty's mother. Whatever the feeling was that came over her in that moment, it was nothing if not ominous.

_Now this definitely isn't going to be pretty._

Reflexively helping to cover the DeLorean at her dad's urging, she grabbed Marty's arm, and he led her toward the door, not fully registering the rapid rise of dread in her eyes.

"Marty, wait a minute," she hissed. "I need to t– no, don't open the door yet!"

Her plea fell on deaf ears. Emma's hands dropped from Marty's arm as he reached for his neck uncomfortably, both of them speechless as Doc ushered in an equally speechless Lorraine. She was now cursing the chivalry of the fifties; had her actual father been there, he would have had his shoulder against the door holding the doorknob while he yelled for her to get the power drill and a two-by-four.

But as it was, Lorraine was in front of them, debating through her stammering what to call Marty and tossing Emma a shy, throwaway smile. Through the embarrassing admission of following them to the lab and awkwardly introducing Doc, Emma picked at the skin of one of her fingernails at her side. It wasn't until Doc edged away and Lorraine shuffled closer that Emma was overcome with protectiveness. Still, with great determination, she forced herself to take a step backward rather than launch herself in front of Marty.

As it so happened, Marty took a step backward as well, trying to keep as much distance between him and Lorraine as possible. But, even in speaking nervously to her shoes, Lorraine inched closer, speaking in broken phrases until her motive was finally made known.

_Ask me to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance on Saturday._

At first, Marty's agape mouth would seem to imply that he thought that, despite having been asked by George, she had turned him down, or perhaps she planned to once securing a date with the person she really wanted to go with. And maybe that's what he was thinking.

But it was nothing compared to what he must be thinking when Lorraine confirmed that nobody had asked her yet. Eyes darting from her to Doc and back to Lorraine, Emma swallowed as Marty tried to keep his composure.

How in the _hell_ was this happening?

"What about…What about George?"

"George McFly?" Lorraine giggled, her knowing smile finding Emma over Marty's shoulder. "He's going with Emma! Didn't she tell you?"

Marty froze, staring at Lorraine in disbelief. The briefest flicker of hurt crossed his face, and Emma shrunk as he looked back at her. His standoffish casualness faltered then; at the stab of pain in his chest, he wrenched his jaw shut, turned to Lorraine, and gave a clipped "no" in response.

"Well, I know he's excited," Lorraine said. "And Emma practically leapt from the booth."

Emma shook her head, mustering up a broken laugh when Marty looked at her again. "That's not what happened."

"It was so cute, but," – Lorraine set her smoldering, sweet eyes on Marty again, sauntering him and Emma backwards into Doc – "I think a man should be strong so he can stand up for himself and protect the woman he loves."

Marty leaned against Doc, casting Emma another withering look. What a goddamned mess.

He rubbed the back of his neck again, and Lorraine batted her eyelashes at his lack of response, prompting him in her confusion, "Don't you?"

Marty gave a breathless laugh. "Yeah."

Lorraine dipped her coloring cheeks to the floor. "So, you'll ask me then?"

Emma, having also found the floor fascinating recently, slowly looked up at Marty. He didn't acknowledge it, instead letting her gaze burn into him in hopes that it might assuage the sting of the other blows he had just received.

And now, it was time for the K.O.

Watching his mouth get ready to form the words, Emma went from apologetic to livid. Given the opportunity to turn her down and put her in her place, and he's actually going to ask her?

_Like hell._

"Marty, you have somewhere to _be _Saturday night," she insisted, taking his arm.

He shook her off immediately with a scorn. "Not till after the dance, I don't."

"Marty –"

"Enough, Em."

Emma's mouth snapped shut, brow darkening as anger began to wrack her entire body. Meeting her disdainful silence and raising her an asking-someone-else-out, Marty looked up at his mother, compelling himself in vain to never, ever remember this moment.

It came out with a bored sigh, the effort to mentally put spaces between his words evident.

"Will you go to the dance with me?"

And Lorraine still beamed.

"Yes! Oh, I can't wait," Lorraine grinned as she spun toward the door. "I have the perfect dress picked out."

"Great."

Lorraine didn't seem to trust herself not to shoot off to cloud nine at that point. She subconsciously touched her hair and flattened the waist of her cardigan, cheeks still pink as she opened the door.

"Well, I'll see you in school tomorrow, Marty. Bye."

Emma stared at Lorraine's perfect smile as Marty waved with his lips in a hard line. Finally, Lorraine left, the door shutting softly behind her whilst Emma dug her teeth into her bottom lip. Fuming to the point of almost visibly shaking, she turned on her heel, storming away from Emmett and Marty toward the side exit.

Doc stood up from the DeLorean when they heard the other door open. He and Marty exchanged looks as Emma's skirt disappeared out the door, the harsh clicks of her shoes following her up the brick pathway.

"What's wrong with her?" Doc asked, regarding Marty cautiously as the kid looked over his shoulder, a deep frown on his face.

"That's what I want to know," he growled lowly.

Marty headed out the side door and started up the slope of the lawn with long, stealthy strides. Up ahead, Emma pushed the front door open with a loud bang, cracking the molding on the wall behind it. Hearing Marty catching up to her, she whirled through the foyer, up the staircase, and down the hallway to her room. She grabbed the door and threw it shut, but it suddenly stopped mid-swing; Marty stiff-armed it just before it slammed in his face. He opened it with a glare.

"What the hell, Em?"

She crossed her arms over herself and faced the window. "I cannot believe you are taking your mother to the dance," she practically spat. Her tone made Marty's eyes spark dangerously.

"I can't exactly pair her off with my dad when_ you're_ going to the dance with him." He let out a derisive huff. "What were you thinking? You couldn't have just said no? Or that you were going with me?"

"I would have if you hadn't told everyone we were siblings."

"That's not the point!" he shouted. "You didn't even tell me about it on the way over here!"

"You could have turned her down just now, you know!"

Marty scoffed. "Clearly digging my grave deeper doesn't concern you. I'm not going to _exist_ by the end of the week because of you."

Emma stopped. Marty felt the fury in his face wane slightly at what he'd said, and her nostrils flared when she met his eyes. It was coming. He felt it. And she wasn't going to be able to stop it.

"Because of _me_?" she snarled quietly, turning to him. "_I_ didn't push your dad out of the way of your grandfather's car."

"Well excuse me if I don't apologize for _wanting to save my dad_."

Emma opened her mouth but paused, pursing her lips and shifting her scornful eyes.

Fine. She wasn't about to bring hypocrisy into this.

"How could you do this to me, Em? How am I going to come back from this?"

"I don't know!"

"It's bad enough I've got to ward off my own mother! But now my dad is going in the opposite direction, too. And, yes, it's because of you!"

"If you're going to blame me for all this, then maybe you shouldn't have dragged me into the damn DeLorean, Marty," she said. "You should have left me on the ground to die, too."

The words exploded between them, their shrapnel devastating. Marty stiffened. Silence thundered in their ears.

Emma seethed, but the dip of her brow became less severe as her stomach quaked, regret kindling within it. She felt a sickening punch at the unexpected quaver in Marty's voice.

"He was already dead, Em," he said quietly, chest heaving. He swallowed, inclining his head to her. "You know that."

"No, I don't," she snapped, feeling her vision redden again. "You didn't check for a pulse or see if he was breathing –"

"I was trying to save our asses!"

"We still could have done _something_!"

Marty eyed her. The desperation that tore through her voice, of wanting to know that having done anything would have saved him, made her breathless panting teary.

"It doesn't even matter now! Even if I make it back to 1985 – and let's be honest," she laughed sardonically, "that's a pretty big damn 'if' – my dad will be dead, you won't exist, and I won't have anything. I might as well just stay here."

Marty stared at her as she looked back out the window, startled to see her considering her own words.

"Em, no. That man is not your father," he said, pointing towards the garage. "You said so yourself! He has no feelings for you as his daughter. He doesn't share any memories with you. Jesus, Em, he doesn't even know the first thing about you!"

She shook her head, trying to ward off the painful truth of his words.

"But he's still alive."

He could not believe what he was hearing.

"What are you going to do? Go down there, tell him you're his daughter, and live happily ever after? It doesn't work like that, Em."

"Then how _does_ it work, Marty?"

"The hell if I know! Doc's the one who invented the damn thing! Ask him!"

"So now it's his fault, too?"

"If he hadn't saw fit to piss off goddamn _terrorists_, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

Emma sneered at him, her heart aching with hate. She shook her head at him.

"You aren't even _worth_ existing."

Marty's rage was snagged by the bitter resentment in her voice. Almost immediately, he nodded resolutely, heading out the door. Enough was enough.

"Fine," he said coldly. "But I hope I still exist when you realize that you're going to be just as alone here as you would be back in 1985."

Emma folded her arms over herself again, wanting to erupt and shout after him as he trudged away down the staircase. Instead, tears finally spilled from her eyes.

She retreated back into the bedroom and shut the door, sinking to the floor against it. She tried desperately to sort out who was really at fault for everything, but it all came down to Emmett Brown hanging a clock. And he slipped because the porcelain on the toilet was wet. Because he forgot to turn the fan on when he showered. Because he was preoccupied with working out some problem with that crazy mind-reading tower. Because he wanted to make his mark in science.

Because.

Because, because, because…

Be cause.

What would be the cause of it all in the end – when she had sat there an eternity and still had no answer as to why this had all happened?

Everything that had ever happened in the history of the universe was influenced by something that came before it; some way, somehow. She should have found some way to turn the situation around in the café. She could have told George no or just screamed it. She could have fought Betty to let go of her arm so she could hide in the bathroom. She could have pulled George aside after their misunderstanding and explained that she was not going to any dance with him ever. She could have sprayed sandpaper glue at Lorraine when she came into the lab and cornered Marty.

Truth is, she and Marty had just had a violent argument that was probably in some way loosely related to the construction of Hadrian's Wall or the invention of peanut butter.

And despite desperately wanting to hollow out a jar as fast as she could to keep the overwhelming emotions from rising in her throat, Emma's face dropped to her knees, and the dam finally broke.


	12. Tick Tock

**Hello, all! I hope you enjoy this chapter! I have to admit, it's one of my favorites; I had a lot of play room! And while being the office manager of a summer camp means I'm about to have zero life until mid-August, I'm going to do my damnedest to update regularly. I'm also working on a little 'concept art' gallery online for this series so you can see Emma and the stages of her development as I wrote this.**

**Also, still super interested in a beta! It'd be super to bounce ideas off someone that loves this story and cares about its direction going forward! PM me!**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

**CHAPTER ELEVEN  
**_**Tick Tock**_

Wednesday, November 9, 1955  
7:33 AM

Emmett was determined to stay out of it.

Marty moved through the kitchen that morning with a hot scowl, shutting the cupboards and sitting his cereal bowl down a little harder than necessary. Marty had asked if she'd left already or intended to stay and pout, immediately declaring that it didn't matter; she'd loused up enough, and he didn't need any more of her help since he was already doing a fine job on his own of making sure he didn't exist in four days.

From one of the riveted armchairs in view of the dining room, Doc flipped his newspaper over. He could understand the kid's ire, and seeing him that mad at himself made Emmett pity him. Marty may have outwardly projected all of his resentment toward Emma, but Emmett knew that kind of anger only manifested from a collection of long-silenced, festering frustrations, usually self-harbored until the shouting started. And as the shouting hadn't extended to him, it was safe to assume for now that he was neutral ground, what with Marty venting at him between mouthfuls of cereal and toast.

Though Marty had dismissed openly caring about anything concerning Emma, let alone her whereabouts, Emmett paused; since he'd been awake, he'd seen no signs that Emma had set foot out of her room yet. He didn't look for her to, either, as upset as she was. Least not to skip along to the schoolyard with Marty.

He heard the height of her sobs through her door the night before with her morphine in hand, but he'd thought it best not to enter, certain she would come to him when her shoulder reminded her how fresh of a wound it still bore. Perhaps she was just mourning her late father, but even he couldn't convince himself of it. Not with the way Marty had fumed away to his own room that night, and now around him this morning.

He didn't get it, though. They were clearly good friends. Even when the other was being insufferable, they seemed to have a word or two about it before casting their disagreement's shadow away and carrying on with their lives. Though, the events in the lab yesterday left little to the imagination as to why this argument was rather cataclysmic.

Still, there was just enough excess spite radiating from Marty that Emmett knew there was something else he wasn't privy to.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. _I do not need two teenagers at war in my house right now._

After Marty left the mansion, Emmett put down the newspaper and quietly went upstairs to the eastern wing. The door to Emma's stay room was closed, emanating a threatening heat from the way the early morning light hit it. He glanced over at the vacant bathroom to confirm her location and silently approached her door again, leaning near it.

"What?" her voice came sharply.

Emmett blinked at the off-putting tartness of her tone and cleared his throat. "I, uh, just wanted to administer your morphine. You missed your injection last night."

"I'm fine."

"I really must insist."

"I said I'm fine!"

Doc stepped back from the door, eyeing it cautiously. A sigh came from the other side.

"I'm sorry. I just want to be left alone right now."

He nodded. "Alright. I'm going out for a bit. I'll be back shortly."

No reply.

With that, Emmett wet his lips, left her to her solitude, and headed downstairs.

_Kids._

* * *

Marty moved through the halls with purpose, weaving through students as if he had heat-seeking radar vision on his father's locker. His lips were pursed, shoulders tense, and the look on George's face when he saw him said it all. Marty tried to relax his stance a bit, striding up to George as the poor kid shoveled his things from his locker. Marty clapped his hands together, still trying to work the anger out of his voice.

"Good morning, George."

"G-good morning…Marty…"

He flinched when Marty threw his arm over his shoulder.

"George, I think you have something to tell me."

"I do?"

"About what happened in the café yesterday?"

George swallowed as they turned the corner past the cafeteria. The words soon rushed out of him. "I meant to ask Lorraine out! I did! But –"

"'But' nothing, George!" Marty pulled him to the side of the flow of gingham dresses and leather loafers, and George started when his shoulder hit the wall. "Didn't your Vader friend tell you it had to be Lorraine?"

Marty watched George go pale. "But… I still got a girl to go with me! I should be okay, right?"

"No, you got my sister, and it's not okay. You're meant to be with Lorraine, George! It's not about just getting a girl – it's all about Lorraine, you got it? Do you _want _your mind melted by that ray gun?"

"No!"

"Alright, listen," Marty said, guiding him towards the Chemistry lab. "We can still fix this. What are you doing after school today?"

* * *

Emmett paused halfway through the entrance of the lab. From within his spacious garage, dark, rich layers of orchestral music patiently blossomed with a steady motif and sweeping harmonies, its graceful tension mounting against a deep, string bass undercurrent. Curiosity piqued amidst the ebb and flow of the piece's grandeur, Emmett surrendered to the entrancing pull and let it guide him to its source.

The phonograph was set up next to his model of Hill Valley's courthouse square, and Emma, perched on the stool next to it with a few tiny jars of paint in front of her, was painting the stationary shop.

Emmett laid his overcoat on the hood of the DeLorean, observing the hypnotic turbulence of the music dancing behind her eyes. She was fully engrossed in her work, humming along with the idyllic modulation as she painted one of the matchbook awnings on the front of the building a pale pink. Her left forearm was carefully tucked into her stomach as she leaned over the little, now-yellow building, teasing the last of the paint from the tiny point of the brush.

"He is a marvelous composer, isn't he?"

Emma looked up calmly as he smiled and moved towards her. He sat his bag of hardware supplies on top of the television set next to the camcorder and rabbit ears, and she gave a half-hearted nod.

Keeping the air amiable, Emmett maintained his polite smile, forging ahead with conversation as he took his lab coat from the coat stand next to her.

"What is your favorite composition of his?"

A sadness crossed her face that he didn't see. But, determined not to let the cold shoulder she was giving Marty extend to her not-yet father, she nodded to the phonograph. "Seventh, Allegretto."

She took in a few measures of the movement as he pulled up a stool on the opposite side of the model, staring at him momentarily.

Despite multiple warnings, despite telling her to stay in the house from the get-go, despite her being headstrong and making a bigger mess of things, he wasn't yelling. He was likely not happy with her, she knew, but it did wonders for them both that didn't bring any of it up – she didn't have to talk about it, and he didn't get the butt-end of her wrath.

He was always rather good at not saying 'I told you so.' When it came to life stuff, anyway.

Put the decimal point in the wrong spot _one_ time, though, and you'll never hear the end of it.

At length, she swallowed and began painting the second awning, adjusting her moodiness to allow him some proper space at the table.

"What's your favorite piece?"

"I have a feeling that you already know," he said casually, plucking a paintbrush from one of his pockets. He reached over the town square for one of the paint jars, settled his elbows on the edge of the tennis table, and began lacquering a lamp post olive green without looking up. "I imagine that I tell you at some point in the future."

"Do you want me to confirm or deny that? It _is _information about the future."

Their eyes immediately met. She knew his opinion on the matter before she'd even asked - trivial matters like preference in Beethoven compositions didn't really alter reality the way knowing the details of your death or meeting your future daughter might. She saw it in the lines of his irises, the spaces between them just as she remembered them being when he turned to her after putting that plutonium in the cab.

_"This is it, Emma. This is the one."_

She suppressed a shiver and lowered her paintbrush. Unable to trust herself with prolonging their wordless conversation, Emma reached for the small stack of albums on top of the beige armchair behind her. She pulled the second album to the top of the pile and switched the records, retuning the stack to the armchair and her paintbrush to the model.

Emmett waited, smiling when the strong, four-note motif of the Fifth Symphony thundered its way into the room. He gazed at Emma brightly, but she remained diligent in completing the third and final awning and did not look up or speak again. His smile waned somewhat at her silence, but it lingered at how matter-of-factly someone knew him. In all honesty, it nearly took his breath away.

He was content to simply share the duration of his favorite symphony with her when she sat up out of her hunch with a wince. He paused at the flash of pain on her face; she did a miserable job of masking it, and they both knew it. Emmett rinsed his brush.

"Would you like your injection yet?"

_No._

…_Fine._

Emma sighed, dropped her paint brush, and slid off her stool.

Emmett smirked.

* * *

A slight November chill had worked its way into the Californian breeze by the time Marty left his father's house in time for Grandpa Arthur to come home. It was still somewhat warm, and it was still California, but the last hour and a half settled on him discouragingly, and another lead weight was added to his stomach. He felt so disoriented despite how focused he was to resolve this situation – to get his father to shut up about Emma and fight for Lorraine on Saturday night. To save Doc from a horrible death. To make things right with Emma.

To get her back.

Get his future back.

As he wearily came to the brick driveway of Doc's mansion, the early evening sky was fading, wisps of deep, cool color on the pastel horizon. He looked up at the windows, wanting nothing more than to fall face-first into his pillow and sleep. But two windows down from his, Emma's were lit up, the shades half-drawn. He felt a little heat on his face and scowled in its direction. She was probably tucked in with a giant textbook, pampered with a ton of pillows and a cool, brimming glass of iced tea.

Marty looked at the lines between the bricks at his feet. He considered for half a moment that he was thinking too harshly of her, but he was still too upset with the things she had said.

Maybe the drugs were making her irrationally angry.

_You're making excuses for her now, McFly? Come on, man._

With that, Marty cast her window one last glance before heading into the lab in search of the armchair, still aching for rest. Doc was over the back of the DeLorean, digging his arm down into the plutonium chamber.

"Hey, Doc."

"Hi, Marty. Ah! Damn."

Marty went to the refrigerator in the back of the lab and quickly piled a sandwich together. "Everything okay, Doc?" he asked with his mouth full, plopping down into the armchair by the Town Square model. A stack of records fell off the back, and he hid his wince before Doc came his way.

"Just a small nick," he said, holding a towel to the back of his hand. "Dare I ask how did things went with your pop today?"

Marty sighed, taking another bite of his sandwich. "I don't know, Doc. I don't know if he's got it in him. You heard my mom – she said she likes a guy that protects his girl, so I made up this plan to be the bad guy and let George protect her."

Doc nodded. "From what I observed Monday morning, he does not strike me as the aggressive type."

"I thought getting him to hit me in front of Lorraine might get him pumped up, you know? Considering he's all upset about not getting with Em? But no. He's even afraid to hit the guy nice enough to take it."

"Regardless, you must make this work for your sake, Marty. Your siblings continue to fade in that photograph."

"I know! And it would have been a hell of a lot easier if Emma hadn't messed this whole thing up," he said, waving in the direction of the mansion. He pushed the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth.

Doc's face softened. "Marty, you cannot blame this solely on her."

Marty huffed out a laugh. Emmett checked his cut and leaned against the stool Emma had occupied earlier that day.

"She can't be held entirely responsible for what's happened. You interfered with a crucial part of your timeline. All on your own."

"Come on, Doc!" Marty said, leaping to the edge of his seat. "I know what I did, but you're trying to tell me she didn't make it worse?"

"That's not what I said."

Marty spoke through gritted teeth. "How could she do this to me? I need to get my parents together before I evaporate and she agrees to go on a date with my dad? You know, she's always had my back, and this one time when I really need her…What is _wrong_ with her?"

Emmett regarded the boy with mild amusement. He could attest wholeheartedly to the frustration women caused, especially at such a young age. Hormones and emotions were the devil. But Emmett felt that this wasn't so much what was driving the girl's actions in this case.

"I agree their interactions have made it an exponentially more complicated matter," Emmett said calmly. "But did you ever think to ask her _why_ she accepted?"

"I-!"

Marty paused. He…He hadn't. He just assumed she had said yes out of guilt or something, but…Emma knew how serious this situation was. She lost her father at the beginning of it all, and if that doesn't set the tone for a serious situation, Marty didn't know what did. He _didn't_ know what had caused her to accept going to the dance with his father, but then again, he hadn't bothered to ask, had he?

_Damn._

He looked up at Doc, and the scientist raised his eyebrows with a thin smile. Another lead weight dropped into his stomach. Blinking, Marty lowered his head.

"I… I guess I didn't."

Emmett tried to reason kindly with him; the epiphany seemed to be a little more than the kid had expected. He sighed, laying the rag on the edge of the model.

"She just lost her father, Marty. She is a thousand miles away right now. Give her some time and some sympathy. It will be alright."

"That's just it, Doc – we don't have time. We have no time. I know she's hurting. I am, too," he admitted quietly, slumping back the chair. "But I can't just ignore what's happened. It's huge, Doc. I'm in real deep right now. _Real_ deep."

Emmett shook his head. "Marty –"

"I don't even know why I bother," Marty groaned, rubbing his face. "You two are just alike."

"Alike?"

Marty dropped his hands to his legs. He quickly gave a nonchalant shrug and half-hearted chuckle. "Well… yeah, Doc. You two always pair off against me."

"Why's that?"

_Jesus, do I really have to spell it out?_

"She's your faithful apprentice, Doc. She loves wires and test tubes and electricity, and it's like watching a film in a foreign language when you two talk about a project. I help, yeah, and I think it's all really cool, but I don't get it the way Em does. I don't know any of the science lingo or theories. But I… like spending time with you guys."

Emmett watched Marty stand, stuff his hands in his pockets, and head back towards the refrigerator. For a time, he looked at the ground, the sounds of cellophane and a spoon in a mustard jar muted in the back of his thoughts.

"What is Emma's last name?"

The spoon _clanged_ back into the mustard jar. Marty turned around, and Emmett gave an innocent shrug. "You never said."

Marty's reply wasn't too fast or too hesitant, much to his own surprise. "Klein," he said. "Her last name's Klein."

Emmett repeated it, feeling how it rolled off his tongue. "Emma Klein."

"When we first ran into my mom and told her that we were siblings, I used Emma's last name to protect mine." He swallowed at Doc's stillness. "Why?"

Emmett stared at the ground a moment longer before feigning disinterest with a purse of his lips. He shook his head nonchalantly. "No reason."

Marty bent his brow. That contemplative look on the scientist's face made him feel like all the air had just been squeezed out of him.

_Son of a bitch._

Marty pocketed his hands again."Where you going with this, Doc?"

Emmett inhaled deeply, leaning off the stool. He was going somewhere he shouldn't be. Treading on treacherous territory with no answers to show for it, and now Marty was picking up on the question between the lines. Emmett looked over at the kid; all he had to do was ask. He just had to ask if he really wanted to know. And an insatiable mite of curiosity nipped at him to do so. But he squashed it as quickly as it came about.

"Doc?"

He looked up and gave Marty a tightlipped, subdued smile.

"I'm going to work on the DeLorean," he said with a nod, pushing his sleeves back up to his elbows. "Perhaps you should make amends with Emma."

He took several long strides back to the vehicle without waiting for an answer. For a few minutes, Marty shuffled around the back of the shop, finishing his second sandwich before he stopped at the DeLorean on his way out of the lab. Doc kept his eyes down, praying that Marty wouldn't press the issue further, continuing to tempt him.

And Marty tried to make himself walk on by, continue on his way; but his conscious wouldn't let him do so. He was tired of feeling so conflicted about everything – the shoulds and the should-nots and the desire to just scream occasionally. It was exhausting and will-breaking, and he just wanted to be home so much.

Turning back to his future mentor, Marty rubbed the back of his neck and sighed.

"Doc—"

"Marty, would you please walk Copernicus for me? I'm very busy."

Marty nodded. He could take a hint. Despite his and Emma's situation, he realized Doc was under the same amount of pressure. They had given him the task to put them back in 1985 with limited technology and knowledge; given him, the crackpot scientist, the chance to prove that he could contribute to the scientific community in a way no one thought possible. And now, even after repeatedly saying he didn't want information about the future, Doc was wondering about one of the biggest pieces of his future. Marty trusted him not to go beyond wonderment, but he wasn't sure he trusted himself not to cross that line for him in that moment. He had almost done so yesterday anyways, hadn't he?

But like himself and Emma, Marty was certain Doc needed reassured in this mayhem, too.

"I'm not ready to talk to Emma yet," he said quietly. "But I will. And Doc," – he clapped him on the shoulder once – "let me know if you need anything? You're doing a hell of a job."

Emmett nodded, his smile tired but sincere.

"Thank you, Marty."

**. Please Review .**


	13. Freeze Frame

**Hello, all! Sorry for the delay! Week 2 of summer camp started today, and now that I've got one week's worth of registraring under my belt, I think I've got a better feel for it and less nerves. I**

**'ve also got a beta! The delightful patheticpisces has agreed to be on board for this series, and it makes me all the more motivated to write! I'm excited that she's excited, so I'm hoping for a snowball effect! **

**What we have below is the first chapter I finished for this story and another of my favorites. I hope you enjoy it as well and leave me a line or two! Enjoy! :)**

* * *

**CHAPTER TWELVE  
**_**Freeze Frame**_

Thursday, November 10, 1955  
7:10 AM

The bell above the door tinkled. George didn't look up, far too interested in finishing his Corn Flakes before he had to get to school. Moments later, the stool right next to him was occupied. His stomach churned unfavorably at the thought of seeing Biff before third block, but his disposition brightened instantly upon seeing soft blond tresses out of the corner of his eye.

"E-Emma!"

"Hi, George."

He paused and shrunk back over his bowl of cereal, sullen. "Your brother doesn't like me talking to you. He said he doesn't want me to take you to the dance."

"Well, that's not his decision to make. It's mine," Emma said readily, tugging the sleeves of her yellow sweater over her wrists. George looked back over at her immediately, but her smile thinned. "But he is right," she said gently. "We can't be…together. I'm happy to go to the dance with you, but he and I are moving at the end of the week."

George swallowed a bite, narrowing his eyes in confusion. "Moving?"

"Yeah. We've been staying with our uncle, but now it's time for us to go back to where we came from," she explained as evenly as possible. "He just doesn't want you to get attached before we leave."

"Is that why he wants to fix me up with Lorraine?"

"That's part of the reason," she said, glancing at the counter. "And she's so nice, George. And pretty. I just know you two will hit it off." She touched his arm. "Just listen to my brother. He knows what he's doing. He's looking out for you, you know."

George still looked put out, sheepishly letting his eyes wander back over to her. "Can we still go to the dance together? You know, just for a dance or two?"

Emma smiled sweetly. She owed the kid at least one goodbye dance for all they had put him through. She pushed away from the counter, her hand slipping from his arm as she stood.

"Sure thing."

"Wait!" The spoon clattered in the bowl, George hastily wiping his mouth with a napkin. "I'll walk you to school."

"Oh, I'm not going to school today," Emma said from the door, bathed in the warm morning sunlight. "But thank you."

George nodded. "You know," – she turned in the doorway again – "maybe when you move, we could be pen pals?"

"I'd like that. But my brother wouldn't."

"Oh. Right."

The bell above the door tinkled.

"See you tomorrow, George."

He blinked, watching her go breathlessly.

"Bye."

* * *

Marty caught up to George at his locker, tearing the KICK ME sign from the back of his shirt.

"George! How are you, buddy?"

George smiled, shutting his locker. "Pretty good."

Marty's eyebrows shot up, thrown off at his dad's uncharacteristic cheerfulness. Was it too much to hope that things were finally being remedied on their own?

"Yeah? Did you decide to talk to Lorraine this morning?"

"…No," George said, falling back into himself again as they headed down the hall.

Of course it was too much to ask.

Marty tried to keep his voice upbeat. "Then what's got you so chipper this morning?"

George looked ill. He put his eyes to the floor and kept them there. Marty chuckled.

"Come on, George! We're pals, right?"

"I guess."

"So tell me."

"I don't want to. You'll probably hit me."

"What? What are you talking about, George? Do I look like Biff?"

"Well…"

"Out with it, George!"

His father led him into his Trigonometry classroom. "Emma came and talked to me while I was at Lou's this morning," he said, not daring to look over at Marty. "She said you didn't want me talking to her because you guys are moving this weekend."

Marty made a face at his desk. "Emma? Where is she?"

"She said she wasn't coming to school and that you were just looking out for me. But she still promised me a dance on Saturday night."

The deep lines of confusion on Marty's face dissipated.

"She said that?" he asked quietly.

George still looked to be anticipating a black eye. "Yes?"

Marty turned toward George's desk, his conversation with Doc the night before nagging at him. "George, what exactly happened in the café on Tuesday? Do you really like Emma so much better than Lorraine that you asked her out?"

"Well, no," George admitted. "I mean, not 'no, I don't like Emma,' but 'no-'"

"Cut to the chase, George."

"When I went inside, Lorraine said Emma kept talking about me and asked me if I'd like to take her to the dance. And…I said yes…"

Marty couldn't help but to smile inwardly. He should have known Lorraine would be the instigator. Especially after that tawdry display in the lab Tuesday afternoon. A wave of relief washed over him, followed by a flood of guilt.

Damn. What an asshole _he_ was.

"Where are you moving to? I wanted to be pen pals with you guys. If that's okay."

"Um, I'll get back to you on that," Marty said distantly. "I'll, uh, try to find out our new address before we go and give it to you."

The bell rang. While George turned his attention to the front of the class with a sigh of relief that Emma's brother hadn't knocked him silly, Marty simply fell back into his chair, dumbfounded.

* * *

Yesterday did little to release the painful tension in Emma's chest since her shouting match with Marty, but walking down the fresh, sunny sidewalks of a utopian Hill Valley put a bit of spring back in her step. With crisp air in her lungs and a whole new perspective on her world to take in, her sunken spirits gradually rose through the morning.

Emma would be the first to admit that she wasn't your standard teenage girl when it came to the stereotypical correlation of how much happiness one incurred by spending hours laden with bags from clothes shopping. Yet, it _was_ strangely therapeutic, having a morning to focus on indulging herself in such a way. Not that she could carry much with a bum arm, but all she really needed was dress for the dance.

A woman waiting for the bus kindly pointed her in the direction of some gorgeous window shops and quaint boutiques where, at the encouragement of the effervescent clerk, she tried on more dresses and accessories in two hours than she had ever worn in her life. None of them held any appeal to the eccentric tastes of 1985, but when she put on the glasses of a 17-year-old girl in 1955, possibilities popped out all over the place.

It was a pale, mint green dress that won out in the end. It had tiny cap sleeves, its neckline hinting at a gentle dip from one end of her collarbone to the other. A thin layer of white, flowery lace draped over the solid color of the dress where it cascaded to her knees with a feminine flare, a band of its lovely mint silk flat around her waist. In 1985, she would be laughed out of the dance with how modest it was, but the bullet hole in her shoulder needed to be safely hidden from sight.

The clerk fitted her with a pair of pearly pumps, suggesting light make-up and an up-do to "bring out the young woman" in her. Emma smiled politely at the woman's referral to the nearby jewelry store.

"Thank you, but I already I have a necklace that will go perfectly with this."

She somehow managed to get back home without toppling over. On her way up the brick walk, she crossed paths with her father, relieved to have him help her carry her packages up to her room.

"I see you bought out Sears and Roebuck."

"Well, a little," she admitted, twisting her pinky. "But I didn't go to the jeweler. I was wondering if you might have anything around here I could use?"

Emmett narrowed his eyes a moment before giving a sharp nod and darting from the room. Biting her lip, she followed him into a large study he used for storage. She mimicked his maneuvers through the room to an upright jewelry armoire next to the window. He told her what she already knew: it belonged to his mother and contained trinkets that pre-dated the Civil War. A few years before Emma would be born, the mansion would burn down, and he would salvage only three pieces from its charred remains, one day giving them to her on her fourteenth birthday – a silver brooch with a tiny emerald, a thick golden bracelet, and a beautiful pearl necklace.

When she found it in the armoire, the look on her face struck him oddly.

"It's perfect," she said, running her fingers over its smooth, cool pearls. "May I?"

"By all means," he urged gently.

He smiled as she picked it up, carefully coiling the loop of pearls in her palm. In that moment, the oddest sense of rightness settled on him. It was as if a perfect thing had just transpired, and he found no other thing in the world quite so worth his while.

"Would you like to join me in the lab?" he asked quietly. She looked up. "I could use the help."

It wasn't fair. This 1955 version of her dad was still able to read her like he'd known her forever. Maybe he wasn't as tuned-in to the world as he would be in thirty years, but she could tell how intrigued he had become over the week that their wavelengths were incredibly synced.

Despite his innate fear of knowledge of the future, Emma could sense his curiosity getting the better of him with this invitation. The short time they had spent together yesterday was just the kind of thing she was trying to avoid, let alone how dangerously enjoyable it had been. She eyed him a moment for a tell that he suspected her as something other than a future lab assistant, but his lopsided grin maintained enough innocence that she accepted.

"What do you need help with?"

* * *

"Doc? Is Emma with you?"

No reply.

"Hey, Doc!"

For a fleeting moment, Marty was afraid he would find him passed out spread-eagle on the other side of the DeLorean.

In a white radiation suit riddled with bullets…

Knowing that was completely irrational but hurrying all the same, Marty grabbed the wooden post next to the DeLorean and swung to a stop, relieved to see Doc bustling about, isolated in one of is perpetual oblivions. The scientist knelt at the head of the long pole and hook with a length of cable, working to secure it.

"Doc?"

The deep humming broke. "Yes?"

Marty took a step forward. "How are things going?"

"We're right on track," Doc said, tightening the bracket head. "Emma gave me a hand this afternoon, and we made excellent headway in preparing the DeLorean for Saturday night."

"Do you know where she is now?"

"In her room. Her shoulder was bothering her." He looked up after feeding the cable through the bracket. "If you two are speaking again, tell her I'll be up around ten to give her an injection."

Marty nodded, casting Doc a wary eye before heading up to the house.

* * *

After a short detour through the kitchen, Marty silently climbed the stairs two at a time and came to stand in front of Emma's bedroom door. He could feel the residual anger from two nights prior still radiating from its tightly sealed doorjambs, and though he knew otherwise, he felt like she had been imprisoned at his doing ever since. They had both said some pretty awful stuff in the heat of the moment, but it didn't help that he'd gone in without a hold on his temper.

He looked down at the glass jar of peanut butter, rolling it between his hands as he tried to figure out what to say. When nothing poetic or profound came to him after half a minute, he hesitantly raised his knuckle to the door, knocked, and leaned towards it.

"Em? It's me."

As expected, the door did not open. He bit the inside of his cheek, speaking carefully.

"Em, I'm sorry I yelled at you. I'm just scared, you know? All of this 'not existing' business... But that's not your fault. Or Doc's. This isn't anyone's fault," he said to the carpet. "It just…happened. And that doesn't make it okay to take it out on you."

The doorjambs continued to glow dangerously.

"Please, Em. You're all I got here."

A fiery, stubborn smolder.

"Please open the door."

Silence. Marty hung his head in wait.

He sighed.

Giving the peanut butter jar a squeeze, he resigned to leaving it on the floor, but the knob turned before he could bend over. Lock softly clicking out of place, Marty straightened as her reproachful face appeared. He met her eyes, astounded with how much his guilt had humbled him in that moment. He swallowed all of the bitter regret, barely able to speak.

"I don't want to fight anymore."

Emma glanced at the floor. "And I don't want you to not exist."

"I know. My dad told me what happened at the café on Tuesday." The mere mention darkened her eyes, but he tread carefully. "I'm sorry I got mad without hearing it from you first. I should have. And… thanks for talking to him this morning. It may have finally put him in his place."

She nodded.

"But now we need to help your dad," Marty said. He held up the jar of peanut butter. "Truce?"

She took a deep breath, studying the disarming sincerity in his eyes. Blinking, she unfolded her arms, opened the door fully, and reached for the jar in his hand with a small, forgiving smile. She joined him in the hallway.

"Come on," he said. "Let's walk Copernicus."

* * *

Emmett was in a coma. He had to be. He had hit his head rather hard on Saturday, and there were some fantastic theories about where the mind went when one was in a coma. Perhaps that's what was happening: he was lying on his bathroom floor, his deepest desire of making a history-altering contribution to science lucidly manifesting in the recesses of his unconscious. He didn't anticipate on creating something that was literally "history-altering," but the two teenage apparitions testified heartily to the fact that it was - and that he had indeed invented it.

He stood at his bedroom window in a stupor, watching Marty and Emma out on his lawn. They'd set out a blanket, a lantern, and a Scrabble board, Copernicus's head resting in Emma's lap as they dipped crackers in a jar of peanut butter between turns. It was so ordinary.

He'd never really taken the time to ponder what youth would do recreationally thirty years into the future, but playing Scrabble was not admittedly the first thing to pop into his head. Perhaps mankind hadn't made any significant leaps and bounds by 1985. Their clothes were a little different, and maybe he didn't understand some of the expressions they used, but they were still very much human, especially where he was concerned.

It didn't take Einstein and Edison to tell him that he wasn't going to have much in the way of companionship in the future. Serious scientists were loners; they didn't get married or have families or friends. They were dedicated to and persecuted for their work. There wasn't time or room for people like that between the sleepless nights and lines of equations on the chalkboard.

So, having Marty and Emma show up at his front door with whom he'd apparently established amiable relationships was a real conundrum. Never mind that they had done so as a result of one of his lifelong works succeeding. Even though sending them back in time had clearly been an accident, they had been there with him, willingly working on a trial experiment with as much excitement as him; otherwise, Emmett did not see himself having them involved in something so important. Scientists had their apprentices, but something about them seemed to suggest that an association greater than that had evolved between the three of them. A bond, even.

Something familial crept into his chest.

He chuckled; how different they were from him!

…but how keen and inquisitive they were about him. About what he did. What his opinions were. The way they challenged and taught him in return for his guidance and approval. How much _he_ trusted and believed _them_. He had never imagined himself entwined in such complex relationships with mere kids, but were they really just that to him anymore? He wasn't sure he could feel such disappointment in himself for endangering their lives if they were "mere kids."

And God _damn_ it, Emma's father. There was no explanation for why he had become so fixated with it, and that alone infuriated him with how distracting it had become. But the absence of evidence was not evidence of absence; just because there were no mentions of it in the tape didn't—

Emmett scolded himself. He was breaking his own rules, risking the very space-time continuum, and at this point, his mind was only going to make connections because he was looking for them. For once, the scientist was discouraging his sense of curiosity. He felt on the brink the night before by simply asking Marty her last name, and the power behind it all was enormous to him.

Further exploration in the matter could only be devastating. He would not bear what responsibility came with such selfish undertaking.

Whoever Emma's father was – a future colleague, a passing face, or he himself – Emmett would find out in due time.

Just like whatever happened after that tape cut off.

_Run for it._

He blinked once.

_Coma,_ he thought, abruptly skulking away from the window. _Coma, coma, coma._

* * *

Emma bit half of a saltine cracker slathered thick with peanut butter, raising her eyebrows at Marty as he laid some tiles on the game board.

"Are you serious?"

Marty wrote down his score as she fed the other half of her cracker to Copernicus. "Why not?"

"Marty, I think this requires a little more tact than walking into the room and announcing without warning that he's going to get shot. You saw first-hand how well that worked Tuesday."

"I had a preamble then; this time we'd lose that. Do you think he'd listen if we told him you were his daughter first?"

Emma shook her head, studying the letters in her line-up and on the board. "Probably as much as your parents would if you told them you were their son." Her letters clattered as they joined those in play, and she straightened them. "FLOCKING. Triple Word on the F and the G."

Marty leaned over the board, his mouth open. "What?"

"You heard me."

"Eighteen times six… a hundred and eight points? Really?"

Emma smiled triumphantly, swiping a healthy hunk of peanut butter out of the jar. "Just write it down, you big sissy. You still have a Z, anyways."

After Emma took a moment to replenish her tiles and feed Copernicus another cracker, she realized how quiet Marty had become, likely sulking. She was about to chide him again when she looked up. The pen hovered over the pad, and above them, Marty's eyes doubled as he slowly met her gaze.

"That's it."

"Yeah," Emma said, slightly thrown off by how excited he was at her mild observation. "Z is worth ten points, and you could play it several plac–"

"Not that," he said, urgently waving his hands to clear away the misunderstanding. He gestured to her, then the notepad. "What you said before: we'll just write it down."

Emma soon mirrored his expression, and Marty smiled, a small huff of laughter escaping him.

"But it still won't work," she said. "He either won't believe you or avoid you like the plague once he reads it. He may even try to erase his mind."

"But—wait, he can do that?"

"Marty, at this point in time, he's not as receptive as we know him to be."

He clapped his hands, the pad of paper scattering their game tiles as he rose to his knees. "Then we put it in an envelope and date it! Like a time capsule! That way when he _is_ in the right mindset, he _will_ listen. We can date it for the day we go back, if anything."

Emma's shoulders fell. "What makes you think that he's going to hold onto that envelope for that long just because we tell him to?"

Marty's light bulb was flickering. He tried to say several things at once, but they kept slamming head-on into the question she had posed, trying to scramble over the need for a logical reason that Doc _would_ do as instructed after they had gone back to the future. But nothing immaculate came to him. Eventually he just shrugged, falling back on his heels.

"I don't know. It's just…It's all I've got right now. We can only do so much, Em."

Copernicus wriggled his head across Emma's lap towards the peanut butter jar. She sat it in front of him, letting him sniff at it before licking it clean. The tight anxiety familiar to her chest and bullet wound seared, crying out for relief in a way that she could only hope to have in this mess. Marty was right; it was their responsibility to tell him, but after that, it was out of their hands. While her future father would likely disregard it adamantly when he discovered it, they had to at least try. What kind of daughter would she be if she didn't do that much?

At length, she nodded. "Okay."

"Do you want to write it? I mean, it might be a little more effective coming from you."

An unpleasant, sour taste fizzled in her stomach. "Sure. I'll do it tomorrow night. It's been a long day, and I'd like to think about it first."

Marty stood, extending his hand to her. With a grateful smile, she eased Copernicus from her legs and accepted his hand. He steadied her at the elbow, preventing her from overexerting her aching shoulder. Despite his assistance, she was panting by the time she was upright.

"I'm going to get this damn thing amputated."

Marty passed her the lantern before collecting the corners of their blanket and throwing it over his shoulder. "No, you're not," he said, patting his leg for Copernicus to follow. "Because then I'd have to listen to you whine about being one-armed for the rest of your life."

Emma smiled. "Is it sad how much I hated not talking to you yesterday?"

"Pathetic."

**. Please Review .**


	14. Of The Essence

**Guess what, guys? Tomorrow is my last Sunday checking in kids for summer camp! I get my Sundays back after tomorrow, along with all the evenings and Saturdays I'm working at home! Summer Camp 2016 comes to a close this Friday, and while I'm excited to get some "me" time back and work on notes to improve everything next summer, I'll be sad to see all the great summer staff and happy campers leave. But bottom line is: way more time to write! **

**The beautiful _patheticpisces_ is to thank for her exceptional beta-ing!  
****And to the reviewer early on who dubbed the Marty/Emma pairing "McBrown": I'm officially on board with that ship name. :)**

**I'm off to compile my last check-in sheet of the summer! Enjoy!**

* * *

**CHAPTER THIRTEEN  
**_**Of The Essence**_

Friday, November 11, 1955  
7:41 AM

By the next morning, Emma had reverted back to the "talk George up" scheme for her final lunch room rendezvous with Lorraine and her friends. Marty didn't understand how this was, even remotely, a good idea, especially considering how spectacularly wrong it had gone the first time around at the café on Tuesday. Emma was clarifying the territorial logic and behavior of girls to him enough that he was following, but still not quite understanding, how this all made perfect sense to females.

Okay, yes, shame on them for not realizing that Emma chatting nonstop about George made it look like she was interested in him. Of course that's what Lorraine thought. That's what any normal girl would think. Clearly, it just hadn't come across the way they had intended it to.

"So, what makes you think you're going to do it right this time?"

Marty zipped her dress, and she let her hair fall over her back as she turned around, adjusting the thin belt at her waist.

"I have a date with him now. She doesn't. And girls always want what they can't have." She put on a sweet, overdone pout and batted her eyelashes coquettishly. "When I talk about how sweet and generous and creative my Georgie pie is, her pretty brown eyes are going to turn green."

Marty made a face, handing her the books from the corner of her nightstand.

"Please don't ever talk about my dad like that again."

Her face deadpanned. "I'm going to have to, Marty. At least around your mother until she gets wise."

Doc suddenly leaned into the doorway. Marty and Emma jumped.

"Are you two ready yet?"

"Yeah, Doc."

His looked at Emma. "Did you remember your medicine?"

"Like I need a reminder," she muttered as they filed out of the bedroom and down the stairs. "I'm starting to regret not sitting this week out like you suggested."

Marty feigned surprise. "_Really_? Just now?"

Doc cast him a stern eye. He was not about to put up with these two arguing again, let alone forty hours until the lightning strike. Marty read as much on his mentor's face and backed off, but Emma still glowered at him as he held the front door open for her.

"If only to avoid being in your mother's gossip gaggle, yes."

* * *

Emma had rehearsed and trained for this covert operation since Lorraine went on the offensive like it was a decathlon, and her preparations did not go unwarranted. Sure, Marty had lines of his own in this little play act, but his appearance was brief. He didn't have to do anything but swing by, confirm his date with Lorraine, and make his interest in her seem convincing for two minutes.

Emma, on the other hand, had to put up a front of how excited she was to be going to the dance with George, not to mention enduring a whole forty-four minutes of being grilled by Babs, Betty, and their ring leader.

'Where were you the past two days?'

'Were you sick?'

'Did you just skip to miss the unit test in Geometry?'

'What color is your dress?'

'Is George picking you up?'

'Is he really as weird as he seems?'

'Or weirder?'

'Are you his girlfriend yet?'

Emma tried to smile at Betty's speculation. These girls were ruthless. And this kind of conversation made her feel like the students she tutored must when they showed up in the library after school – helpless, desperate, and uncomfortable.

Next to her, Lorraine sighed dreamily.

"I hope Calvin asks me to be _his_ girlfriend at the dance."

"What about me?"

The four girls looked; Marty was there, his sleeves rolled up and jacket slung over his shoulder. While Lorraine's cheeks colored and Babs and Betty grinned, Emma rolled her eyes at how long it had taken him to show up, let alone in some 'cool guy' get-up. She bit back her annoyance as Marty picked up her apple, tossing it in his hand.

"You gonna eat this, sis?"

"All yours."

Lorraine finally had the courage to look up again when he took a loud bite from the apple.

"Hey, Lorraine."

"Hi."

"How about I pick you up at your house tomorrow night around eight?"

She tucked her hand under her chin, beaming at him. "That would be perfect."

"Oh, and Em? George says he'll be picking you up at seven. He wants to treat you to Lou's before the dance." Emma played along and perked up in surprise at Marty's wink. Betty slapped her arm playfully as the girls dissolved into laughter.

"I _knew_ he was going to ask you out!"

"Hey," Marty said, pointing at Betty, "he has to go through me first."

"Aw, let her, Calvin! He's all she talks about!"

Marty and Emma shared a quick glance, confirming they were still under the radar. Emma firmly looked away, signaling his exit. With another bite of his apple, he winked again, this time at Lorraine.

"See you tomorrow, Lorraine. Eight o'clock sharp."

* * *

It is often said that there is nothing more intimidating than the blank page.

Frayed threads of possibility weave into endless chains of ideas, and the perfectly crafted thought on the tip of the tongue is ever-evasive. This in itself either fuels determination or causes it to wane. Second guessing, pen tapping, eye strain, brain fog – they happen to the best of those in search of the most effective opening.

_This isn't hard_. _You just don't want to do it._

Emma nodded to herself. _That's true._

After getting the first sentence out, she was sure there'd be no issues filling the page. But the first sentence wasn't even in question yet; how does she open the letter? Is it a letter? Or just a note? Does it need addressing?

The answer is yes, only because now he was formal with them as far as informalities go. And he was still somewhat of a stranger to her. So, yes, this was a letter. That much she could confidently say.

Now, does she start by addressing it "Dad" or leave it for the end?

At the beginning, it's a fabulous attention-getter. Surely, every word he read after that he would take seriously. But then again, with a bomb like that dropped on him one word in, he might find it hard to focus on whatever she wrote after it. Or even mistake it as a letter to someone else that had somehow ended up in his possession and discard it. Not that that was likely, but "endless possibilities" was a big thing with him.

No, putting it at the end seemed the better option. He'd read it, find out that she was his daughter, perhaps do a bit of reeling, but then reread the letter several times to make sense of it. Maybe.

Still, while that was the biggest of her debates, others nagged at her incessantly.

How does she say what needs to be said?

"Shot by Libyans?" "Killed by terrorists?" "Gunned down?"

Is it a long explanation or short, simple thing?

Authoritative and imperative? Pleading and apologetic?

"_Dad,"_

Okay! This was good. A good, solid start.

Well, no. Because if he read it bef—?

But wasn't the whole point t—?

Emma grunted, balling up the sheet from the legal pad. She knocked it away with the back of her hand, and it rolled to the other side of the desk where a small pile of freshly crumpled paper teetered on its edge.

For real this time. This was the one.

She put her pen to the paper and stopped.

She couldn't call him "Doc." It didn't sound right, not even on paper. This was her father. She'd forced herself to skirt around calling him by any proper name all week, and now that she was confronted with having to choose one, she took the easy way out and continued on, sans greeting.

"_On October 26, 1985, you, me, and Marty are conducting the first temporal experi-"_

That was too detailed.

But maybe the big science words would keep him from thinking this letter was for anyone but him. Maybe that was the hook she needed to keep him reading instead of calling him "dad" outright.

…How detailed should this thing be? Would telling him that he dies during the initial run of and as a result of the DeLoreon and flux capacitor end up discouraging him from ever pursuing it?

_Oh, hell._

She sent the pen flying and sat back in her chair, huffing at the paper.

What were the rules when it even came to this kind of stuff?

* * *

"I can't do it."

Marty looked up from the television as Emma fell into the couch next to him, defeated.

"Can't do what?"

"I can't write the letter!" she half-whispered in frustration. She grabbed the throw pillow at the far end of the couch and pushed it into her uneasy stomach as she tucked her feet up under herself. "I don't know what to say! What _do_ I say? Should I tell him everything or be as vague as possible? Do I tell him who _I _am? Is that even relevant to the whole thing? I don't know if it should be short or long or scolding or sorry or just…euragh!"

Her overwhelmed nerves sent her forehead between his shoulder and the couch with a helpless, muffled grunt of resignation. Marty's eyebrows raised at her outburst.

"I need your help," she practically whimpered.

Marty sighed, calmly looking over at her crinkled mass of loose waves spilling over his shoulder. The television's light gave her rounded back and calves sharp contrast, but the firelight touched her wild tresses with all of the soft warmth of an oil painting.

He swallowed.

…_What the hell, McFly?_

Suddenly, her breath found that exposed part of skin where his shirt had ridden up against the cushions, and he blinked at the sensation, rolling his neck slowly to ward of the goose bumps travelling up his spine.

Now was not the time to be dwelling on such things - such things as Emma recently being able to desensitize him as easily as throwing a switch, for example. And when exactly had "recently" started?

He should not have even _entertained_ acknowledging this stuff right now. Whatever "this stuff" was. Not when she was on the verge of legitimately wigging out. You'd think the girl had misplaced her organic nomenclature notes to the point of searching the freezer again.

The situation at hand, however, was way more serious. Doc didn't get shot by terrorists because Emma couldn't find Chemistry notes. And regardless of what involuntary thoughts, feelings, and reactions he had "recently" been having towards the girl stuffed into his shoulder blade, she was a friend that needed him above all else right now.

Carefully, Marty shifted his right side into the arm of the chair.

"Em."

Already emotionally numbed from her escapades at the writing desk, Emma hadn't the mind to do anything but bat her eyelashes as Marty laid back into the corner of the sofa, took the throw pillow from her, and dropped it to his lap. Emma hazily stared at Marty's arm outstretched beside her. He nodded to himself, the fingers of his left hand extending a quick, fluttering invitation to come closer. Her eyes met his in a wordless exchange, and he simply reached for her.

Before Emma could let herself overthink more things than she was already overthinking, she boredly told herself to shut up, stretched out on her right side, and let her head settle into the pillow. The curve of her neck relaxed as black and white flickers from the television danced along it. In some other state of mind, she would be incredibly proud of herself for not flinching as Marty's arm draped over her, fingertips barely touching the pleated waist of her silken nightdress.

Right now, his contact seemed a necessity, not a desire. She needed somebody, something to reassure her that all three of them were going to come out on the other end of this thing okay. It seemed to be all catching up to her after being bombarded with the questions posed while writing the letter to her father; one wrong move was all it took. Emma putting one word out of place, Marty pushing his father out from in front of a car, Doc miscalculating by a single decimal place – everything hung in the balance of the simplest things that shouldn't require any thought or no-never-mind.

Instead, she folded her knees up over her churning stomach. She sighed again as Marty's thumb grazed a small spot on her arm. _Rin Tin Tin_ came back from commercial break.

"What do we do?" Emma asked at length.

Marty looked down at her, lowering his fist from the side of his face. Her rosy nightgown and Doc's oversized robe cascaded over her and off the couch, much as her hair had sprawled into his lap. He couldn't count how many times they'd hung out on the couch at the end of a long study session or because they simply didn't want to do anything for the rest of the day. And, yes, they'd sat shoulder-to-shoulder occasionally and dozed off that way, but having her laying at his side with his arm around her like this?

Friendly casualness, comforting, what have you; everything aside, this was a first.

And it felt like they'd done it a hundred times.

_Wow._

Swallowing, Marty gently clutched the excess of robe at her waist. "We'll write it together tomorrow."

"Do you think we're going to be okay?"

Marty's heart sank. Emma, who had been barreling headlong through this week so very brave-faced, was finally beginning to show the hope wilting within her. He sat back into the couch. Of all the difficult questions she had ever asked him, this was one of the hardest.

"Of course we are," he whispered, trying to convince himself as much as her. He curled his hand over hers. "We're going home tomorrow night, Em. Where your dad is alive and waiting for us."

Emma's throat thickened. Her lips shook.

"I miss him, Marty."

He squeezed her hand and didn't let go.

"So do I."

* * *

Emmett let out a long withheld sigh as he shut the front door.

_Tomorrow's the big day._

The biggest day of his life.

And as much as he felt prepared for it – after all the checking and double-checking and losing sleep – the nerves in his stomach trembled like far-off rolls of thunder.

Succeeding meant happily working towards something he'd always wanted for the next thirty years, knowing that it would work and impact the very core of science across the board. But more so, it meant that Marty and Emma got their lives back.

He could only imagine himself standing in that mall parking lot thirty years into the future expecting their return, only to have lost them at his expense. He could only imagine the repercussions of them missing this lightning bolt.

Soft voices drifted through the foyer from the living room. Deciding to put off his late dinner a while longer, Emmett passed the tower of the Brain Wave Analyzer and paused in the entryway of the living room.

A peaceful, peculiar scene greeted him. _Ethel and Albert _was just starting, their banter being the voices he had heard. The room was on the verge of being too warm, but the fire was now reduced to coals and embers glowing like molten light in a pile of ashes. And between the dying fire and television set, his two charges for the week were fast asleep on the couch.

Marty was sitting up, his side nestled into the crook of the sofa while his knees jutted out from the sofa's edge at opposing angles. One hand cradled his lopsided chin, smooshing his cheek enough that his mouth was opened. The other, Doc was intrigued to see, held Emma securely around her waist. The small fingers of the arm she was laying on poked up through the spaces between his limply. She had a pillow in Marty's lap and took up the length of the couch, her body lost under a pale pink nightdress and his silver snakeskin robe.

Emmett let a smirk through.

He wasn't one to openly encourage such things. And it was entirely none of his business. But it wouldn't be very honest of him not to admit – to himself, at least – that he wasn't surprised.

Again, until 1985, this was none of his business.

His business dealt with getting them _back _to 1985 tomorrow. And, in the meantime, giving Emma her nightly dose of morphine, no matter how serene she looked tucked in next to Marty.

Emmett shut the television off. Rolling it off to the side, he turned back to the silent, synced breathing of the teenagers. With a gentle touch of her forearm and softly speaking her name, he roused Emma. She took a deep breath and held it, flexing and wriggling her toes. Her eyelids opened fractionally.

"Hmm?"

"Emma, it's time for your injection. We need to change your bandage, too."

She groaned dismissively, hiding her face in the pillow.

"I must insist," Doc urged. "You need it before it gets too sore for you to sleep well."

Still half-asleep, Emma took stock of her shoulder. The burn was moderate and the stiffness severe. In about half an hour, she wouldn't be able to bear it.

Doc patiently waited for her eyes to meet his. When they did, the clouds in them began to clear. She yawned; the muscles in her neck tensed and left her with a sour grimace. Emmett smiled sympathetically. He tugged on the edge of the robe's sleeve, giving a wink.

"I was wondering where this went."

Emma dug the heel of her hand into her eye. "Sorry."

"You're quite welcome to it. I'll go get your shot and meet you upstairs."

"Okay. Thank you."

"Okay."

Her father's footfalls had died away at the top of the stairs by the time she made herself open her eyes again. She looked at Marty's knee just beyond the edge of the couch. The weight of his arm around her blossomed a tired smile over her weary features.

Couldn't she just lay here forever? It seemed worth losing a limb.

Until sharp pain seized her at random moments out of nowhere.

Okay, no, it wasn't.

_Ow._

_ Ow, ow, OW. Ow._

Reluctantly, Emma slid her right arm underneath herself and began to get up. Marty stirred, but Emma was able to slip away without waking him. He wet his lips and repositioned his face in his hand, promptly falling back asleep.

**. Please Review .**


	15. Synchronize

**Hi, all! I apologize for the absence; I just wrapped up buying my first home! It started way back in July, and I didn't get moved until a few weeks ago. Friday was the first chance I had to sit at my computer properly since my last update due to all the boxes I've been swimming through. Still, I own a house! And I have the latest chapter below! **

_**Patheticpisces** _**is the best beta! :)**

**And a big thanks to each of you who reviewed, especially if I was unable to get back to you personally. You complete me. And you've made this story the most-followed BttF fanfic on the site! I can't even EXPRESS how amazing that is! Enjoy the next installment, and I'll see you before Christmas for sure!**

* * *

**CHAPTER FOURTEEN  
**_**Synchronize**_

Saturday, November 12, 1955  
8:30 AM

It was a harsh reality waking up in her bed, having barely remembered her father tending to her shoulder the night before. Emma was half-afraid she had dreamed falling asleep on the couch under Marty's arm; it had been as pleasant as it had been wearisome to lament over the uncertainty of their situation with casual physical contact.

But, as her hand slid down the smooth railing to the silent first floor in the fuzzy beams of diffused sunlight, her lips pulled to the side to see Marty exactly as she'd left him. His fist had pushed his jaw slack from the angle of the armrest, and his other arm rested on the pillow where her head had been.

Emma eyed the empty length of cushions she had occupied; would it be so difficult to slip right back onto that pillow? He'd be none-the-wiser.

She straightened her back in the face of such thoughts, ignoring its gnaw. If she was still lying there, what awkwardness would ensue? Was there a line that had been crossed last night? A true, definitive one? He had encouraged and all but laid her in his lap, but there were some strong, ugly, scary emotions attached to that comfort – the sounds of rapid gunfire, the guilt still pounding in her chest over their shouting match, the horrors of what possibly awaited them – or rather, who didn't await them – back in 1985 if this whole lightning stint was even successful.

It could wait. It had to. She wasn't going to keep a level head tearing open invisible wounds, staring blankly at her jumbled emotions, and dwelling on them right now, not when they had so much to get through today. So, as to ward off those monstrous shadows, it was imperative to keep their narrative as normal as possible.

Paying a visit to the octagonal table in the foyer, Emma picked up a set of blueprints her father had missed during his tirade when they'd shown up a week ago. She smiled down at the calipers he had edged toward her menacingly as she rolled a rubber band off the blueprints.

Throwing her clumped, crinkled bedhead behind her shoulders, Emma let the ends of the snakeskin robe trailing along behind her on the floor as she returned to Marty, testing the elasticity of the rubber band between her fingers. With a steady exhale, she planted her feet, extended her arms, said a silent apology, and released the rubber band. It snapped soundly just above the inside of his elbow, and laughter immediately leapt from her when he all but crashed to the floor between the couch and coffee table. She winced through her giggling at the ensuing _thud_, proudly maintaining an impish smirk as he sat up, panting incredulously.

The rubber band had done its job and done it well.

"Take it easy on the table, McFly," she chided, pushing its legs back into the impressions of the thick rug as he clambered to his feet. "It's an antique."

Before Marty even had a chance to retaliate with more than a vengeful scowl, Doc entered from the back door, Marty's suit for the dance draped over his forearm.

"I should have thought you'd both be in the lab packing up for tonight by the time I returned!" he called, detouring to the kitchen for an apple. Approaching the stifled rubber band conflict at the coffee table, he passed the suit to Marty, nodded to the staircase, and made for the back door. "Get dressed and meet me in the lab in fifteen minutes! There's still some calibration to be done as well!"

Emma made for the stairs with a smirk at Marty, her brow deepening when he smirked back, snapping the rubber band back at her calves. His smile at the yelp she emitted was short-lived; in one fluid motion, Emma seized an umbrella from the stand at the foot of the stairs and raised it in retaliation. Marty made to cower behind his suit bag when Doc boomed, "Drop it!"

"Yeah, Em. Take it easy," Marty goaded quietly. "It's an antique."

A silent standoff manifested, and Emma ultimately relented under her not-yet-father's stern glare with an angry pout as she shoved the umbrella back into the stand. Everything slowly came to motion again at her surrender, Doc eyeing them both until he left the room.

Emma rolled her eyes. The fact that he was hardly this chastising in 1985 irritated her as much as Marty's smugness radiating from two stairs below her. She narrowed her eyes at him.

"You're –"

"—lucky you weren't near any power tools. I know."

She pursed her lips, continuing up the stairs. "I still have one good arm, McFly."

* * *

As hoped, The Great Rubber Band Incident of November 12, 1955 was successful in maintaining the established rapport between Marty and Emma, both content to leave the previous evening unacknowledged as they worked with Doc through the morning. And, much to Emma's relief, her father made no effort whatsoever to mention it, pry, or coax details from them, not even with a passing comment or casual question. His discretion might be the one thing she actually admired about the younger version of himself.

She could also admire the improvement of his dressings on her shoulder over the past week; with each evening's cleaning and bandaging, the gauze squares became thinner, making her less self-conscious about a visible puff under her dresses. His perfected lightness of hand made the removal and replacement of the tape, the swabbing of iodine and salve, and the delivery of morphine to her veins virtually painless.

She, too, had improved at a few things during these sessions, none of which surpassed her ability to emotionally shut down and exchange small talk with ease.

Emma pushed the tiny sleeve of her Enchantment Under the Sea dress aside and surveyed her father's latest bandage in her vanity mirror. Flat, compact, and structurally sound, she sent another silent "thank you" out into the universe to her not-yet-mother for giving him some early pointers in first aid. Pulling the sleeve back up, she moved a stray wisp of hair back into her updo, tightened the backs of her teardrop pearl earrings, and crossed the hallway to Marty's doorway.

Inwardly chuckling at "Rock Around the Clock" playing on the small radio from within his stay room, Emma knocked, smiling as he looked over from fastening his tiepin in a floor-length mirror. Rather unexpectedly, her smile grew when his fell, eyes widening ever so slightly in greeting. His hands slipped from the tie.

"Wow, Em," he said quietly, subconsciously appreciating her in his reverence. "You're supposed to ward him off, remember?"

Emma huffed out a laugh. "I'll take that as a compliment." She turned in the doorway, exposing the smooth expanse of her back to him. "Do you mind?"

For the briefest of moments, Marty wasn't sure she had said anything. His eyes ran up and down her back as he approached, a fleeting sense of panic hitting him when he realized he was involuntarily committing the curves of her shoulder blades and the light mole in the small of her back to memory. Finding the zipper just below it, he slowly pulled it to the bottom of her neck, hoping she hadn't felt his fingers fumble.

Dispelling the thickness from his voice, Marty dropped his hands to his sides. "You're good to go."

"Can you see the bandage?"

"No."

"Oh, one more thing."

With a half-turn, she held up the pearl necklace that was not yet hers, wordlessly asking for his assistance. Marty took it, a chill sweeping over him as he berated himself for wondering if her back shared the same cool, flawless texture of the pearls. He'd seen her back how many times this week?

_Reel it in, McFly._

Lying one end over her wounded shoulder, Marty carefully reached around the other for the clasp. He brought the ends together, ignoring the way each pearl glided over the rise of her clavicle with commendable composure. She thanked him when it settled on the back of her neck, but he could only manage a nod in response; an overwhelming urge to rest his hands on her hips when she turned to go to the mirror sent them deep into his pockets.

This was _not _cool.

Marty's reflection appeared beyond Emma's in the mirror as she scrutinized her make-up one last time. Through the silver-plated glass, she threw a smile back at him, wiping some excess lipstick from her upper lip.

"What?" she teased. "You've never seen a girl gussied up before?"

"Not this girl."

"I've been wearing dresses all week. Much to my dismay."

"Not this dress."

Emma stood straight. She locked onto his reflection's eyes, daring herself to turn and meet them face-to-face. His thoughtful silence pierced her, the way his head was tilted just so and the steady beat of his eyelashes making the aftertaste of her toothpaste acrid in the back of her throat. She needed something – anything – to get him to stop looking at her like that. They had a hell of a mission to see through, and while it was a mere three hours until the lightning strike, so much could still go wrong.

Marty stood on the verge of plummeting into a bottomless abyss, gradually accepting that he was becoming more and more willing to throw himself into it the longer he stood there. His mind was screaming at him to smash the Pandora's Box of all that was unspoken but pleading with her to do it so he didn't have to. Whether she heard it or not, Marty's chest clenched when she dipped her head, reluctantly severing their eye contact at Doc's hard-soled shoes climbing the stairs to collect them.

Marty sighed through his nose, surprised at how calming it was in the face of his own disappointment to reunite with Emma's smile, even if it was strained. She gave his lapels a tug, her voice small as she winked.

"You're supposed to ward her off, remember?"

In a final wordless exchange, Marty conceded to drop the matter, taking her bait with an exaggerated grimace. "Christ, Em, you had to remind me."

Her smile was gracious as Doc rapped on the door.

"Didn't you hear me? Time to go! Out. Out, out out!"

* * *

Their final attempt to appeal to Doc regarding the events in which they had arrived in 1955 and to which they would soon be returning was met with another heated refusal to see reason: _Even if your intentions are good, they could backfire drastically. Whatever you have to tell me, I'll find out through the natural course of time._

Which was exactly what they didn't want to happen at all.

Emma was near tears by the time Marty pulled her away from the "weather experiment" and into Lou's Café, his own stomach anxiously twisting in upset. Seeing Emma to a booth, he asked a pen, an envelope, a sheet of paper, and two cups of coffee of Goldie, the lone employee tending the bar.

Not ten minutes later, Emma was considering each word carefully as Marty read their letter aloud in the dim café. His voice was unsteady, his note short and to the point. "Disaster" might not have been the word she would have used – "tragedy," perhaps – but it would get the point across. Whatever words the ink had leaked into the fibers of the page, the message that filled the spaces between them could not have been spelled out more simply. Maybe by 1985 when her father opened that letter, if he did at all, he would understand.

And that was all she could hope for now – that he would understand.

Marty looked up at her from across the booth. She was still, frowning into an untouched cup of coffee. She absentmindedly lifted the spoon out of it, tilted its tiny puddle back into the oily murk, and scraped it off the smooth ceramic. Taking a deep breath, Emma let the spoon clink loudly into the bottom of the cup and her hands fall to her lap, not sure what to do with them. Finality loomed in the air, palpable and heavy on her chest. She nodded, swallowing the emotion welling up in her throat.

"It's good," she whispered. "It's good."

"Do you want to add anything?"

Emma shook her head, sniffed, and held her breath. "No. Just…" She shut her eyes, wiping away the black smear under her lashes with her thumb. "We're going to be late."

Marty watched her come back down, his own chest tight. The image that had plagued him over the last week was fresh as ever; that split second he looked back from the DeLorean and just _knew_ Doc was motionless from the weight of death crushing him into that cold, wet asphalt. That was the moment that clamped down on his throat, trapping the blood in his ears and the hopelessness in his eyes. And Emma – god, what she could only be going through. He couldn't even pretend to guess.

Sighing, Marty laid the pen next to the saucer and folded the crisp stationary. Emma slid from the booth and looked out the window at her father mounting the cable to the far lamp post, and warmth filled her ears with thick patches of cotton crackling when she swallowed. She calmly met Marty's eyes when he was standing next to her, sealed envelope in hand. He pushed his lips together to resemble an attempt at a small smile.

Wordlessly, they left the café with polite nods to Goldie behind the counter who was towel-drying a handful of soda glasses before closing up shop for the night. Emma willed her pumps to a whisper as they crossed back to Doc Brown and his DeLorean being snooped on by a bored police officer. Marty slipped the envelope into Doc's coat pocket, looking back at Emma as she came to terms with the fact that it was now entirely out of their hands.

She took a deep breath. "Ready?"

Marty nodded, leading her to the Packard by her fingertips. "Let's get to it."

* * *

The lively radio initiated the transition of their dismal spirits in the café. Then, through some prompted banter, Marty and Emma were quickly able to pull each other back on track, burying thoughts of Doc, the letter, and his survival until they had once and for all secured Marty's existence.

Marty pulled over a block away from the school, lobbing the gearshift into park. The Packard chugged idly, and Emma smiled over at Marty as her fingers wrapped around the door handle. She paused, however, reading an unfamiliar expression in the lines of his face. Perhaps they were just obscured by the odd angles of refraction the streetlights had to contend with to reach the inside her eyes in the darkness of the car, but for such austere shadows, his eyes were softly fixated on her.

"What?"

Marty shook his head. "Nothing."

"Is there something wrong with my hair?"

"No."

Emma inclined her head, bringing out her serious eyebrows.

"Your hair is fine, Em," Marty said. "You look…great. You look beautiful."

Emma looked down at her lap, smoothing the snowy floral lace over the sea-foam silk of her dress. He was all compliments tonight, and she was coming undone by them unacceptably fast. She wanted to blame the morphine for suddenly turning her into an emotionally unchecked school girl. She wanted to blame missing her real father for her desire to constantly be close to him. She wanted to blame that ludicrous five minutes in his bedroom an hour ago for throwing impossibly big questions at her. She knew it was all false data, though.

She wanted him because she wanted him, plain and simple.

It was just getting to be too much to handle, like everything else had been this past week.

Before she could get ahold of herself, Marty had reached for her hand and pulled it back toward him. She turned to him slowly, her heart thudding so that it left her a little breathless. He was staring at her hand the way he had stared at her in the mirror, one of his holding it while the other trailed over her knuckles and fingertips in thought. _She_ stared at his ministrations as intently as she had the DeLorean when it reappeared in the JC Penney parking lot a week ago; was this real, whatever it was?

"Em, we're in trouble."

Blinking, she made herself nod at his soft echo of some of the first words he spoke to her when they arrived in 1955.

_Trouble. _

Her eyes pricked fearfully in the silence, a deep tremor fighting to overcome the tense muscles of her abdomen and rack her entire body.

This was where he let her down easy. This was the part where he told her he only liked her as a friend, wanted to see how things with Jennifer went, actually saw her as a sister now after playing big brother for a week…

Forbidding herself to physically respond to the sudden onslaught of her sympathetic nervous system, Emma felt the entire flood of adrenaline vanish sickeningly when Marty stopped his caress of her hand.

"For once, I'm actually jealous of my old man."

Emma's head shot up. "I-I'm…What?"

Marty smirked to himself before meeting her wide eyes.

Forget his friends and his family and the whole damn town. Hell, chalk him up as one of the crazies if need be. Not one of them meant to him what she did, and he was done being afraid to admit that.

In fact, it was time to start proving it.

"Will you go with me to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance? In thirty years?"

The conversation Emma had been anticipating had just taken a merciless one-eighty, hurling her in eight different directions. She gaped at him, torn between hope and misunderstanding.

"What about Jennifer?"

"What _about _Jennifer? I want to go with you."

"…Really?" she squeaked.

Marty swallowed. "Em, I'm not lying to you or myself anymore. I'm not. I'm done pretending that it bothers me when my bandmates call you my girlfriend or that I'm going to have a future you're not part of."

Emma held her breath as he touched a wisp of hair next to her ear, carefully searching her eyes for the same confession. "I want to _be with _you when this is all over. When we're home and everything is okay again."

Nothing seemed more okay to Emma than in that moment. All she could do was nod. Heat surged across her cheeks as he leaned in and kissed her, bringing one of his hands to the back of her head. She laced their fingers together and pulled him closer with them, inviting him to deepen their kiss.

She was so lost in the unknown time it took to compute bliss to reality that she squealed when a car drove by, honking its horn. Marty and Emma leapt apart, watching it go around the bend with more honks and general hoorahs of approval out the window. Emma felt her laughter ignite every nerve ending in her body, cheeks and fingertips aflame.

"I hope they didn't recognize us," she said, raising her eyebrows back at Marty. "We _are_ siblings after all."

Marty laughed. "I doubt they saw our faces."

Emma's blush drained momentarily. A pale pink, shimmering sheen was on his mouth.

"Oh, shit," she whispered, reaching over and rubbing his lips with the heel of her hand. "I got lipstick on you! Lorraine is gonna—"

Marty sputtered her hand away. "Em, Em! It's a little lipstick," he said, pulling a kerchief from his jacket. "Are you afraid my mom'll beat you up or something?"

Emma chuckled, taking the proffered handkerchief from him to clean off her hand. "No, I'm afraid she'll beat _you_ up. That girl is all claws."

"Tell me about it."

She handed the handkerchief back after folding it, their bright eyes meeting again. The corner of Marty's mouth pulled upward into a smirk again, and Emma was suddenly sitting on her bench in the town square with him as she had so many times before. Everything about this moment was familiar and new and made her want to leap off something. She'd eventually admitted to herself some time ago that she wanted him to look at her with the look that changes everything - a longing smile in his eyes that she herself had already reserved for him.

And it made her skin tingle to realize it had just happened.

"So, 6:30 then?" Marty asked. "In thirty years?"

Emma beamed. "You bet."

"Take care of my dad. And I meant what I said."

With a nod, Emma found the door handle. Stepping out of the car, her heels scraped the asphalt as she spun to keep her dress from catching in the door.

"Hey, Em?"

Emma leaned down to the passenger window. "Yeah?"

He motioned to his mouth. "You might want to touch up your lipstick."

Emma kicked the front tire, smacking the hood of the car as she laughed.

"Go get your mom."

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